Liu's video, choreographic performance, paintings, and sculpture, starts with research-based fictions. From existing socioeconomic and political conditions, she builds fabricated narratives that speak to and consolidate contested accounts of the past and present. It is important to her to avoid abstractions, and make abstract but vital concepts - such as global economic infrastructure - emotionally available and intimate to the senses. Labor politics combined with histories of East-West colonization, radicalized by environmental catastrophe, is a continuing theme throughout her works.

Liu's video, choreographic performance, paintings, and sculpture, starts with research-based fictions.

Jen Liu - Backslash Artist 2022

Jen Liu

Backslash at Cornell Tech funds artists whose practices are nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies – all symptoms of being backslash.

Matthew Weinstein

Behind The Scenes

I began my Backslash process by asking a question, “what is anti interactivity, or what is the negative space around interactivity?”

The Living End - Matthew Weinstein - Backslash 2017

The Living End

Mika Tajima

In New Humans, emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool.

New Humans - Mika Tajima - Backslash 2018

New Humans

Ying's work explores the online worlds and creative interventions of netizens in the ‘Chinternet’ (Chinese Internet) along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and contemporary consciousness created by the intersections of real and virtual life.

Miao Ying - Backslash Artist 2019

Miao Ying

What happens if you are liquidated – financially, socially, politically, subject to climate-induced flooding? Under what conditions is it possible to survive?

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea - Jen Liu - Backslash 2024

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea

Christie Neptune is interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space.

Christie Neptune - Backslash Artist 2021

Christie Neptune

At the heart of Mika Tajima’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans performance, sculpture, painting, and new media installation is a profound inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy in built and virtual spaces.