Jen Liu (US, 1976) works with video, painting, sculpture, biomaterial, and dance performance to speak to issues of diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, speculative feminism, and the remotivating of archival artefacts. Based on her research on existing socioeconomic conditions, Liu creates fabulated narratives which reinterpret contested accounts of the past and present. Jen Liu’s latest painting explores the hidden labor behind modern technology, outsourced to the global south in the 21st century, and references the historical and contemporary invisibility of Asian women. The painting depicts the back of a Chinese woman’s head, adorned with 19th-century-inspired hair jewelry and marked by silver drops, as if quicksilver was dropped on her head. The figure could represent the anonymous, underpaid individuals who perform small online tasks for machine learning algorithms, forming the backbone of AI yet remaining unseen and unrecognized. But Liu also draws a parallel to the historical exploitation of Chinese women smuggled into the U.S. in the 19th century as sex workers, whose invisibility was enforced by exclusionary laws. Similarly, today’s workers, like those on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, remain hidden behind digital