Still, Life

798CUBE presents Liu Jiayu's solo exhibition "Still, Life," curated by Jussi Parikka, tracing ten years of the artist's practice at the intersection of nature, computation, and perception.

From 25 September 2026 to 31 March 2027, 798CUBE presents "Still, Life" (双曜), a solo exhibition by media artist Liu Jiayu, curated by media theorist Jussi Parikka with Frederic Fol Leymarie serving as art-technology advisor. The exhibition draws together Liu Jiayu's work from 2014 to the present, marking 798CUBE's second solo case study of a China-based artist and a key coordinate in the institution's ongoing research into how technology, nature, and ecology intersect in the digital age.

Liu Jiayu treats computation as a method for investigating nature, in the way ink-and-landscape painting once was — air, wind, waves, marine life, electromagnetic signals, and quantum fluctuations all become, in her work, "active matter" within systems of machine learning and perception. Rather than simulating the organic world, her installations construct a synthetic exchange with it, in which the natural and the artificial meet on the same ontological plane, each mediating and developing the other.

The exhibition unfolds across two connected levels at 798CUBE, conceived as a continuous Möbius-strip-like circuit rather than two separate floors. The first chapter, upstairs, treats computational modeling and environmental sensing as an artistic method in its own right, revisiting the legacy of abstract art through the lens of machine ontology — much as a trained hand's brushstroke once carried the history of a discipline, Liu Jiayu shows how learning and rehearsal give a computational landscape its own aliveness, unfolding into an open ecology rather than a closed simulation. The second chapter, in the basement, extends this elemental aesthetic into an architectural register: synthetic celestial light drifts through the space, liquid surfaces become flickering screens, a garden becomes a site where multi-species computational life takes place, and a pond gathers the show into something closer to ritual contemplation — the five classical elements refracted through technological mediation into an emergent material condition that is neither metaphor nor simulacrum.

Liu Jiayu (b. 1990s, lives and works between Beijing and London) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2014 and founded her studio the same year. She taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts from 2016 to 2019, and in 2022 represented China at the 59th Venice Biennale with the China Pavilion exhibition "Meta-Scape" (元境). Since 2023 she has developed Jiayu\, a self-built AI-driven algorithmic module central to her recent work, and in 2025 began a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London's newly founded Doing Computational Human-Machine (DCHM) research center, focusing on generative AI, machine perception, and their intersection with artistic practice. Her work is held in the collections of the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen Bay Culture Plaza Design Museum, Zhejiang Art Museum, the CC Foundation, Lenovo Future Center, and the Xie Zilong Photography Museum in Changsha, among others.

Curator Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Research Professor at the University of Southampton, UK; he was elected to Academia Europaea (Film, Media and Visual Culture) in 2021. His books — including Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), What Is Media Archaeology? (2012), A Geology of Media (2015), and Operational Images (2023) — have been translated into twelve languages. Alongside his academic work, Parikka curates internationally, including with transmediale (2023) and the Helsinki Biennial (2023), and co-curated Weather Engines (Onassis Stegi, Athens, 2022) and its follow-up Motores del Clima (LABoral, Gijón, 2023–2024).

Exhibition design was sponsored by COLLECTA and led by KITCHEN, working with the artist and 798CUBE on the exhibition’s spatial design. Together, they established the physical logic of the “fold” between the two floors and the display sequence of newly commissioned works, including White Surface, Sailing, Living Signal, and Living Shell*, alongside existing works spanning the artist’s decade-long practice.

Liu Jiayu, *The Side Valley*, 2018. © Liu Jiayu, courtesy of the artist

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