Xin Liu's The Permanent and Insatiable: Houston, 2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium

Xin Liu's The Permanent and Insatiable: New York, 2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium.

Xin Liu's The Permanent and Insatiable: The American Flag, 2025. Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, TLC tank, incubator.

Artist Statement

The Permanent and Insatiable is an installation series that explores the almost mythic tension in material sciences: Humans continuously create indestructible permanence (like plastic) while engineering bio-organisms to consume exactly those materials.

Each installation in the series constructs miniature cityscapes modeled after urban architecture from post-consumer PET plastic, which is commonly used in bottles and packaging. These structures are submerged in transparent bioreactors, where genetically modified and lab-produced enzymes gradually dissolve the installation. The first work in the series, commissioned by Moody Centre for the Arts, recreates downtown Houston and Rice University’s campus. The second iteration of the series is a faithful replica of Lower Manhattan financial district's architectural landscape. Inside each bioreactor, I imagine a world where metropolitan cities with an excess of manmade materials are confronted by the appetites of natural microbes.

Compressing a degradation process that typically spans centuries into weeks or months, the miniature world is redefined as an environment in relation to humans and our interactions with it: our uncanny desire for immortality and fear of permanence. Aren’t we the most insatiable ones?

In 2018, I initiated and led the research project MicroPET: developing a modular bioreactor for a plastic degradation payload at the International Space Station (ISS). It is an autonomous payload for enzymatic reactions and microbial cultivation with fully programmable serial passaging and sample preservation. The team successfully conducted the payload experiment in the International Space Station in December 2022. The project is recognized as one of The Best Inventions of 2023 in TIME magazine and has been accepted into Nature Partner Journal Microgravity. The research work seeded the conceptual and technical development of The Permanent and Insatiable.