Exposing the messy nature of reproductive labor

The milk on this exhibit just isn’t actual. After a lot experimenting, Liu ended up filling the pump with “magician’s milk,” a proprietary system, bought from a magic store, that requires no refrigeration and comes with the warning “Not a meals product. Don’t drink!” Nonetheless, it seems to be convincing. When putting in the piece, Liu initially thought of having the milky coils take over the entire gallery flooring, much more aggressively immersing guests within the visible and aural panorama of new child care.

Liu, who holds graduate levels from the Harvard Graduate Faculty of Design and the MIT Media Lab, resumed educating simply 5 days after she gave beginning in 2021. She had simply signed a brand new contract as an affiliate professor of observe at Penn, and the college gives maternity go away solely to workers of greater than a 12 months. Although she was initially allowed to show over Zoom from her dwelling in Queens, she ended up pumping greater than nursing. “I developed this actually intense relationship with my pump, the place simply listening to the sound of it made me let down, fairly than my child’s cry. It was simply such a bizarre Donna Haraway cyborg second,” she says, referring to the feminist science and expertise scholar who wrote, of the cyborg, that it “doesn’t dream of neighborhood on the mannequin of the natural household.”

It was additionally a second that led Liu to new analysis. Her discoveries emerge within the works on show within the Cuchifritos Gallery, which embrace a collection of three-dimensional meditations on expertise, motherhood, and childhood in our algorithm-­enabled world. 

Pumping can be on displayas a part of the second version of the exhibition “Designing Motherhood,” now on the MassArt Artwork Museum in Boston. Michelle Millar Fisher, a part of the curatorial group, wrote that the work “cuts proper to the center of the methods wherein reproductive labor is hidden, romanticized, socially taboo, and undervalued.” 

Liu’s work has further urgency and resonance after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Who controls, who helps, and who performs reproductive labor usually are not simply bed room or broom closet questions (and by no means ought to have been); they’re enjoying out on the streets, in state homes, and within the Supreme Courtroom. 

Millar Fisher has drawn parallels between Liu’s pumping set up and the work of the artist Hiromi Marissa Ozaki, generally known as Sputniko!, whose 2010 Menstruation Machine simulates the expertise of menstruation; the video a part of the piece exhibits a fictional day within the lifetime of a younger man who builds a tool to expertise life as an individual with a uterus. 

Liu has lengthy been fascinated by this form of simulated expertise. In 2019, after watching YouTube movies of males sampling simulated labor pains with a purpose to perceive their wives’ expertise, and discovering them wanting on a number of ranges, she determined to create her personal apparatuses, together with a garment known as Untitled (lady pains), fitted with a stomach and electrodes, that may enable any non-pregnant individual to expertise the burden and discomforts of being pregnant. One other within the collection, Untitled (small inconveniences), simulates incontinence. Made in collaboration with fabricator Randi Shandroski, the clothes seem like lingerie and simulate one results of intercourse, however these usually are not experiences typically thought of horny.

Her items show a mischievous humor, embedded within the on a regular basis indignities of contemporary life. Client tradition may appear to have fun being pregnant, however the merchandise pushed to pregnant individuals concentrate on all of the issues which are “flawed” with the pregnant physique: temper swings, stretch marks, incontinence. In response, Liu created Consumerist Being pregnant, which features a collection of lotions, masks, and medicines, designed in excessive millennial type (monochrome packaging, sans serif fonts) however actually labeled “Fatigue,” “Shortness of Breath,” “Swelling.” In the event you noticed them on a pharmacy shelf you’ll be initially attracted, however when you learn the outline, whilst an individual who has been pregnant, it might be onerous to not say No, thanks.