THE LAND AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

What happens if you are liquidated –financially, socially, politically, environmentally? Under what conditions is it possible to survive? 

Labor activism in China has greatly changed since 2016, symptomatic of larger changes in the global economic and political landscape – and it has become nearly impossible since 2019. This film considers these changes as a series of deaths: the death of Chinese labor NGO’s, unable to survive in the face of overwhelming governmental force; the death of techno-optimism, unable to provide any solutions to concrete environmental and social problems, and the impending death of a body of artwork, which has been unable to assess future sociopolitical possibilities accurately. Firsthand accounts of industrial workers and worker poetry are combined with other nonfiction sources to create a melancholic script for live action underwater scenes featuring a protagonist who has no other options but to sink to the bottom of the sea, surrounded by ravenous mermaids who are under no obligation to obey human courtesies.

But the poetry of this film is just a candy shell: packed within its digital body is an archive of disappeared women activists, tens of thousands of vlog transcripts, screenshots of social media posts, studio portraits and family photographs – anything that could be gathered until the moment of the film’s premiere in late 2023. For activists like Sheng Mengyu and Zhang Zhan, even if they’ve since been released, there is no way to preserve their former activist work other than to preserve it by hand against both active deletion (hacking and keyword blackouts) and link obsolescence (passive online information death). This archive has been built into the body of the video itself, with each frame a covert carrier of another image, through steganography, a form of dark encryption.

Jen Liu is a New York based visual artist working in video, painting, dance performance and biomaterial. She has presented work at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, The Kitchen, Sculpture Center, Royal Academy, ICA London, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Wien, the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; the Times Museum Guangzhou, Today Biennial Beijing, Shanghai Biennale, Singapore Biennial, and Taipei Biennial. Liu’s recent body of work, Pink Slime Caesar Shift, centers stories of political resistance, loosely built on a speculative proposal to use the domestic food distribution network in China as a covert information network for labor activists.

The Land At The Bottom Of The Sea (2023), 4K video, 27 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. 

KIRIK’s 2025 programs are supported by the SAHA Sustainability Fund.