Ani Liu: Eye Heart Womb is part of In The Making, a documentary shorts series from American Masters and Firelight Media follows emerging cultural icons on their journeys to becoming masters of their artistic disciplines.
Director Statement from Miao Wang
When I first encountered Ani Liu’s work, I was struck by its hypnotic beauty – futuristic, meticulous, filled with wonder. Beneath the sleek lines and technological polish, I found myself pulled into the small, tender and haunting details: perfectly red silicone lips backlit on Petri dishes, alive with microbial blooms that mapped mood and exhaustion; the glass pig uterus holding both human and pig fetuses, suspended between life and speculation; the acrylic vials arranged like DNA strands, marking every feed and diaper change of a newborn. Through these details Ani questions how we understand our bodies, gender, labor, and lived environment.
As the mother of a young toddler recently weaned from breastfeeding, Ani’s visualization of feeding and diaper change – and the rhythmic hum of the breast pump – triggered a particularly visceral response. I came to motherhood late, and after many years of independence pursuing my filmmaking career, I’ve been utterly humbled by the relentless demands of care work I never truly appreciated until my own pregnancy. When the nurse first wheeled a hospital-grade breast pump over to me in the post-delivery room, I was shocked that it looked every bit as archaic and monstrous as the mammogram machines that flatten our breasts into pancakes. Worst of all, with my breasts attached to a big machine by a labyrinth of tubes, I felt trapped. These are unseen labors – unacknowledged and unmeasured, and yet all-consuming.
Artist Ani Liu.
Ani has a gift for rendering the invisible visible—transforming the private, bodily, and emotional into something shared and culturally resonant. Her work is born from the raw immediacy of her own experience, yet grounded in the rigor of research and technological inquiry. When she told me she was working on a new piece that emerged from an article that revealed the presence of microplastics in breastmilk, I knew I had to film her.
In my conversations with Ani, I found a kindred spirit. We both inhabit the in-between-between the cultural identities and traditions of East and West; between a spiritual pull towards the ethereal and the grounded logic of the cerebral; between the desire for personal expression and a reverence for the collective.
When I reached out to Ani to discuss filming, she was in the delicate final weeks of her third pregnancy. She courageously welcomed me and my small film crew into her life during that vulnerable time. I remain in awe of her endurance—spending entire days with us while sharply focused at work: sculpting, molding, pipetting, sitting through long interviews, speaking eloquently and insightfully just two weeks before giving birth. I think back to my own final weeks before delivery, when I could barely sit still from discomfort, let alone articulate my artistic practice.
This film seeks to illuminate the lived experience of a working artist-mother, who is deeply embedded in her artistic practice, her home, and her community. Ani’s practice inspires us to recognize and embrace the full spectrum of our human experience, where the most profound questions don’t resolve into easy answers about “what makes a better world,” but live in the tension of asking instead: what is better, and for whom?
More about artist Ani Liu
Ani Liu is an internationally exhibiting research-based artist working at the intersection of art & technoscience. Integrating emerging technologies with cultural reflection and social change, Ani’s most recent work examines the biopolitics of reproduction, labor, care work and motherhood. Ani’s work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society.
Ani is the winner of numerous awards including the Princeton Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, the Virginia Groot Foundation Fellowship, the S&R Washington Prize, Prix Ars Electronica, the YouFab Global Creative Awards, the Biological Art & Design Award, Triangle Arts Residency. Ani’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artnet News, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and her solo show in Ecologies of Care was named as a best of 2022 highlight in Artforum. She has been profiled by Science Friday, National Geographic, PBS, the MIT Tech Review, BOMB Magazine, VICE, WIRED, TED and Gizmodo, amongst many others.
Ani is passionate about integrating multidisciplinary approaches to art making, and is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Ani has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, Columbia University, and is on critique panels at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Pratt, Parsons, The New School. Ani has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab. Ani continually seeks to discover the unexpected, through playful experimentation, intuition, and speculative storytelling. Ani’s studio is based in Queens, New York.
