With Plastic-Eating Enzymes, Xin Liu Critiques Consumerism

Just two works make up ‘The Permanent and the Insatiable’, Xin Liu’s solo show at Management in New York. One, a large aquarium featuring a model of lower Manhattan submerged in water, stands in the centre of the dimly lit room. Titled The Permanent and the Insatiable: New York (both works 2025), the ominous sculpture raises immediate questions. Is this a post-apocalyptic fantasy or a prediction of the city’s fate in light of the rising sea level – or both?

Mixed with the distilled water is a plastic-eating enzyme that Liu, an artist and engineer, synthesized in collaboration with researcher Erika Erickson. Resembling a ghostly exoskeleton, the model city is made of post-consumer plastic that is primarily clear in colour. When submerged in the enzyme solution, this plastic slowly dissolves, less permanent, apparently, than the buildings represented.

This process, the gallery director tells me, is expected to take years. The second work, The Permanent and the Insatiable: American Flag, offers a glimpse into the dissolved future. Inside an incubator rests a smaller aquarium featuring repurposed plastic resembling the US flag. With a greater concentration of enzymes and higher temperature, the dissolution of the plastic is expedited, showing signs of buckling after just a few days of being installed. Initially standing, the flag quickly fell to its side where it remains.

Using post-consumer plastics and images of capitalism – downtown Manhattan is famously the home of Wall Street, and the ersatz flag’s green and white colouration evokes the nation’s greed – Liu offers a clear message. Studies of the proliferation of plastic in the world and in our own bodies abound. The toxic material’s permanence (when it’s not being broken down by enzymes) is a monument to humanity’s appetite for commerce (or at least America’s), which Liu seems to suggest – with good reason – is insatiable.

In a commercial gallery setting, the work hints at institutional critique. Is collecting art not just another form of consumption? Yet, the deliberate accelerated deterioration of the works upends some of collecting’s conventions, likely putting off most private buyers. There is of course precedent for collecting conceptual and ephemeral art, but with Liu’s work, what a buyer will own is unclear, even to the gallery. The components that contain the plastic and enzyme solution like the aquarium will remain, but the American flag and cityscape should eventually degrade. Perhaps they’ll leave evidence of their destruction, such as discoloured water. The slow disintegration of plastic recalls a durational performance, another discipline that asks buyers to embrace the intangible, or to acquire a work’s afterlife.

With Liu’s cityscape, it’s hard not to think of Damien Hirst’s then-groundbreaking glass tanks filled with formaldehyde and dead animals. Even the titles – Liu’s The Permanent and The Insatiable: New York and Hirst’s famous tiger shark iteration, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) – have apparent poetic similarities.

Yet, their impact couldn’t be more different. Hirst’s piece is expected to last forever, a headache for those responsible for replenishing the formaldehyde mixture when it inevitably becomes cloudy. There have even been instances when the animal itself has had to be replaced. The artwork and the care needed to preserve it indefinitely confirm the title’s message while belying the artwork’s permanence, as if Hirst egotistically couldn’t fathom the possibility of the work’s own ‘death’.

Liu poses the opposite scenario: a work of art that takes up only as much space and time as she has allotted. Her sculptures’ ephemeral nature is part and parcel of their beauty. After all, with so much of art hidden away in (energy-consuming) storage, why need an object be permanent anyway?

Xin Liu, ‘The Permanent and the Insatiable’ is on view at Management, New York until 13 April

^{Main image: Xin Liu, The Permanent and The Insatiable: New York (detail), 2025, post-consumer PET and PET filament, distilled water, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, glass aquarium, aluminum, acrylic, stirring and heating system, 91 × 91 × 121 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Management, New York; photograph: installshots.art / Inna Svyatsky}