Meat Ghost is haunted by the ghosts made by technology: voices that outlive their makers, as well as the machines that contain them. Discarded sentiences, they keep performing emotional labor after there is no one left to receive it.
Jeni Abramson Gallery is pleased to present Meat Ghost, a solo exhibition of new work by research-based, multidisciplinary artist Jen Liu.
Meat Ghost is haunted by the ghosts made by technology: voices that outlive their makers, as well as the machines that contain them. Discarded sentiences, they keep performing emotional labor after there is no one left to receive it. The exhibition brings together sound sculpture, video, and paintings on paper. These works originate in NEW HUMANS, Liu’s ongoing body of work that re-examines contemporary life through the movements of Chinese women in the Americas, their histories of migration placed at the center of the political and economic universe.
In the sound sculpture Corpus Delecta, Liu duplicated an audio response chip salvaged from a pre-AI sex doll. The voice on the chip speaks to her “master” in Chinese accented English: these are audio recordings of a doll factory worker in Guangdong, recorded and then sealed into innumerable silicone bodies sold in the US.
15 of these duplicated chips form a chorus mounted on a large pegboard, reprogrammed to respond to its own voice: a “mother chip” that speaks a particular history of machinic servitude via roleplay, with quotes from Fei-Fei Li, Harun Farocki, and an early AI jailbreak involving instructions for making napalm.All the processing chips lie inside a plastic pod that simultaneously recalls Brancusi’s bronze heads and the clear iMacs of 1999, and it’s been wired to reflect modern milking machinery.
Corpus Delecta is linked to a couple small paintings on paper: Meat Ghosts I and II. Gooey pink figures rest in old fashioned Chinese interiors, criss-crossed with black cables and objects that resemble data center stacks. We see them through holes that are traditional Chinese moon gates, or close-ups of the holes in the neighboring Corpus Delecta pegboard. The paintings play off existing paintings of the Eight Beauties of Qinhuai, famous female scholar-courtesans in 17th-century China. They also nod to the Feng, a mythological Chinese monster made of meat that purportedly grants immortal powers when eaten. In 2012, rural Chinese villagers claimed to find one, only to discover that it was a discarded silicone sex doll.
In Memoirs of an Automaton, Liu 3D-scanned a 19th-century automaton of a late Qing Dynasty woman, and mapped it onto a new digital armature. The figure, joined by a small retinue of other automata, speaks about what it feels like to be a soul trapped in a technological cage, memory as time travel,and remaindered life after death. It’s never clear whether it is the ghost of a human or the ghost of a machine; perhaps it’s one and the same, as a figure originating in a period in history in which the Chinese were brought in as temporary sex workers, coolies, and scabs, human lives as machine parts shipped to fill an order. Such terms of life shape today’s digitized labor: the microworker, the gig delivery worker, the Uber driver, the sex doll, the AI bot. The video asks whose spirits inhabit the machine, whether the mechanical past dreams of a digital future, and what living ghosts have been created by our everyday technologies.
About the Artist
Jen Liu is a Taiwanese-American New York-based artist working in video, painting, biomaterial, and programming, on histories of labor, diasporic Asian identities, and technology’s role in entanglement capitalism.
Recent gallery exhibitions include Pound of Flesh, Silverlens NY (2026); Glorious Substances, Beautiful Settings, Upstream Gallery (2026); I Am Cloud, Blindspot Gallery (2024); and GHOST__WORLD, / (Slash) (2024). Liu is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, LACMA Art + Technology Lab, and Anonymous Was a Woman Award, amongst others. She’s presented work at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, and The Kitchen; and has participated in the 2015 Shanghai Biennale, 2019 Singapore Biennial, 2023 Taipei Biennial, and multiple iterations of the Berlinale. She will be included in the 2027 Henie Onstad New Visions Triennial (Oslo), as well as the 2027 Yokohama Triennial.
Programming, in collaboration with BAD ASIANS
The programming surrounding Meat Ghost will include a live conversation between Jen Liu and Patty Chang for the Studio Visits series presented by BAD ASIANS, a performance activation by Ione Wang, and an exhibition tour for AAPI sex workers led by Kayla Tange of Private Practices.
Programming
Studio Visit: Jen Liu and Patty Chang
Saturday, November 7, 2026, 5pm – 6pm PT
In person and livestreamed. Liu and Chang will discuss “affection, femme bodies on the edge, slime, silicone, hagfish and sex chips.”
Register on Zoom: https://bit.ly/jen-liu-bad-asians
Opening reception: November 7th, 6pm - 8pm PT
461 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004
Details of Ione Wang’s performance will be announced.
Press inquiries: info@jeniabramson.com