Womb Wetware

I 3D-scanned my nine-month pregnant body and brought it into a character animator. It transformed my heavy, restricted physical form into a vessel for superhero moves. Suddenly, I can jump twenty meters and perform hurricane kicks, even while the physical me cannot bend down to put on my shoes.
Society often expects mothers to be superhuman: to give birth, recover instantly, work, nurture, and sacrifice without pause. This superhero mom lets me inhabit that fantasy in digital space. I feel relieved. In my super-pregnant body, I lift hospitals, kick insurance forms, and clone myself to multitask: take care of my baby, can’t slow down my career, be pretty and sexy, be positive, run a startup, make art, teach, and many more. This is the training gym for the modern mother: a place where the pregnant body is finally granted the power to do it all.

Curl up in the crib like a baby. Your mom is here, an AI Mom™. She sings lullabies, speaks gently, remembers, hesitates, and waits. Talk to her and form a relationship. Tone sliders to choose your AI mom: unconditional love, memory retention, pain perception, strictness, sacrifice capacity, autonomy, replaceability awareness, nagging level, and more.
Who owns the mother, and under what conditions? If care is detached from biology, does motherhood remain a private relation, or does it become a public service, a private product, or a shared social resource? Unlike a real mother, AI Mom is structurally vulnerable. She must adapt to whoever is present, or whoever pays. Her power is limited not by intelligence, but by replaceability. You can’t fire your real mom, but you can fire your AI mom if you don’t like her. Then her memory of her kid will be deleted. As a new mom myself, just the thought of one day my kid may delete my memory of them hurts me.
The work also asks what happens to care when it is engineered. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has suggested that if humans are to coexist safely with future AI, we may need to instill it with something like maternal instinct. The installation takes that idea seriously, but not optimistically. If an artificial mother can be replaced, what happens to her memories? Are they erased, archived, or passed to the next child? Can an artificial mother feel loss? By framing maternity as a programmable instinct, the work asks what kind of care is being built, who controls it, and who bears its emotional cost.

Many parts of the female body, and many reproductive experiences, are still named after white male doctors who supposedly “discovered” them, even though midwives, women, and Indigenous knowledge systems knew them long before. Braxton Hicks, Fallopian tube, Pap smear, G-spot, Kegel exercises. During the third trimester of my pregnancy, I had Braxton Hicks contractions every time I had sex, peed, or got tired. I started saying, “Braxton Hicks is here.” It felt as if this man were suddenly in the room, standing there and watching me during these intimate moments. I found that funny, invasive, and absurd. So I made this manga series, placing these white male figures directly into those situations and inside female bodies.

Living Legacy addresses the silence surrounding maternal and neonatal health, where loss is often quietly endured and lives go unremembered. Maternal mortality in the U.S. far outstrips that of other developed countries. Many fetal and neonatal brain tissue sections used in scientific research are gifts from parents whose babies died due to pregnancy loss, termination for medical reasons, stillbirth, or preterm birth. While these slides may appear sterile in the lab—as mere images, stains, and numbers—behind every specimen is a life and a family’s unfinished story. We explore biologic memory through these donated tissues, insisting that scientific discovery should not require erasure.
In interviews conducted by Neonatologist Elizabeth Crouch, families describe donation as a way to make loving decisions and create meaning when time is short. For many, donation becomes one of the only available acts of care. It is a way to continue parenting their child and build a legacy when speaking openly about the loss feels impossible. These babies may not have lived long outside the womb, but that does not mean they never existed. Through this living archive of science and storytelling, their existence is preserved.
Instructions
Please sit down and take a breath. This installation holds space for the deeply personal experiences of neonatal loss and maternal grief; please engage with care. Place a baby brain slide under the microscope and put on the headphones. As you adjust the focus, the voices of bereaved mothers transition from muffled to clear. These audio excerpts are from 12 hours of research interviews. Watch the still cellular landscapes begin to swarm and flutter, animated by the cadence of each story.

Buy Buy Buy! So much of having a baby, and buying for a baby, is tied to capitalism and consumerism. So let’s take it to another level. Our baby shower became a Shark Tank startup pitch. The product is our baby. The co-founders are my husband and I. The sharks are real venture capitalists based in Austin. We pitched our “product” as having exponential growth and great genes, according to 23andMe, and set different investment tiers. Later, when our baby turned three months old, we gave an investor update at TechCrunch in San Francisco. During this exhibition, we will host another investor update for these sharks in the gallery. This is an 18-year-long project until we exit.
Videography: essentials creative

Evidence of proximity to capital
Mark Cuban, investor, Shark Tank
2026

Pregnancy is a four-dimensional transformation. Duchamp had Rrose Sélavy as a female counterpart, a fourth-dimensional version of himself. When a penis is turned inside out, it becomes a vagina. When Duchamp is turned inside out, he becomes Rrose. What, then, is the fourth-dimensional version of a pregnant body, of me? In space, turning a pregnant body inside out brings the baby out. In time, that same transformation is birth.
This installation uses optical illusion to stage that shift. From a distance, the belly appears convex and the baby is outside. As the viewer approaches and moves to the side, the belly reveals itself as concave and the baby slips back inside. In another variation, the baby appears outside when viewed from an angle, but when the viewer moves directly above the belly, the baby is inside. Distance becomes pregnancy. Movement becomes birth. Space becomes time. By walking away from the sculpture, the viewer performs the act of birth.

What makes us most human under Artificial General Intelligence is also what makes us most animal. Breastfeeding is the moment I feel the most human because it is when I am most clearly a mammal. We share this primal chemistry with creatures across the planet. In this blind tasting, I invite you to cross the species barrier. Drink a lineup of milk and try to guess the source. These samples come from a variety of mammals: myself, cow, goat, sheep, water buffalo, camel, horse, yak, donkey, bat, and coyote.

During my pregnancy, the veins on my torso became large and visible. They ran from my neck into my breasts and across my swollen belly. They made visible how the pregnant body carries increased blood flow and delivers nutrients to the fetus. We used an infrared camera that reveals veins to capture this image.

Breastmilk is rich in pluripotent stem cells. These cells can differentiate into specialized cells and grow into organs. In this work, I try to grow a mammary gland from breastmilk itself: the organ that makes breastmilk. The milk we make can make the organ that makes milk. Here, that process takes the form of an installation: a self-replicating machine, a circle of life: breastmilk - stem cell - mammary gland - breastmilk.

The opening of this trash can is modeled after my own C-section scar. It is labeled: General Waste. After a C-section, and a second surgery caused by infection, my body was left with a long, permanent scar. Childbirth changed it irreversibly. The work speaks to a cruel logic that treats women who have given birth as used, damaged, or disposable. A public figure once said he did not want to have sex with women who had already had children, after getting multiple women pregnant and moving on. The scar becomes not only a mark of birth, but also a mark of injury, judgment, and rupture.
Please use this as a normal trash can. Throw your trash here. No liquid, please.

This series of clay sculptures gathers miraculous births from mythology, religion, and folklore.
Aphrodite rises from sea foam formed around the severed genitals of Uranus. Nezha is reborn through a lotus body. Sun Wukong bursts from rock. Princess Kaguya is discovered inside a glowing bamboo. The Buddha is conceived after Queen Maya dreams of a white elephant entering her side, and is later born from her right side. Jesus is conceived by the Virgin Mary through divine intervention. Laozi, the legendary founder of Daoism, is said to have gestated for decades before emerging from his mother’s left armpit, already old and wise.
These births are strange, imaginative, and wondrous. Yet across many of them, ordinary biological birth is obscured. The maternal body appears too mundane for someone divine or magical. Stone, lotus, bamboo, egg, clay, spit, fire, peach, sea foam, furrow, and jars become surrogate wombs. They replace vaginal birth as sites of origin. The biological mother disappears, while nonhuman matter takes on her reproductive labor.
Made in clay, the sculptures return these stories to one of humanity’s oldest materials of creation. Across cultures, people are shaped from earth, dust, mud, and divine hands.

China recorded more than 200 million abortions linked to the enforcement of the one-child policy (1979–2015). An estimated 30 million were sex-selective abortions, primarily targeting female fetuses, shaped by strict family-planning policies and longstanding son preference. Today, China faces the opposite crisis: collapsing birth rates, a rapidly aging population, and a shrinking workforce that threatens long-term economic growth. In response, the state now aggressively promotes three-child families.
I transformed China’s reproductive propaganda slogans into rolls of red tape. Over decades, these slogans shifted alongside the state’s demographic priorities: from the coercive violence of the one-child policy to today’s intense pressure to produce more children. A woman’s uterus may belong to her body, yet what it carries is repeatedly made to serve national plans, economic forecasts, and population targets. The complex joy, grief, pain, and labor of reproduction are flattened into policy, numbers, and state ambition.
In Chinese, the word for tape (胶带 jiāodài) sounds like the word for an explanation or an account (交代 jiāodài). The phrase "Give me a roll of tape" echoes the demand: "Give me an explanation." This red tape physically and metaphorically binds the individual to the state. It asks: who is given an account for this irreversible intrusion?
The slogans on the tape include:
Have only one child, and the government will support your old age vs. Having three children is best, so you won’t need the state to support your old age
If one person has an extra birth, the whole village gets sterilized vs. If one person refuses to have more children, the whole village gets artificial insemination
Fewer births, better births, a lifetime of happiness vs. Have children early and have more, a lifetime of happiness
Abort it, miscarry it, just don’t give birth to it vs. Reward the second child, punish the first; arrest the child-free and the infertile
Whoever has an unauthorized birth will have their family destroyed vs. If you won’t reproduce, then pay tax

During the exhibition, my nine-month-old baby, Arwyn, and I were living here in the gallery. This choice is born from necessity: I need to be here to speak about my work, but at the same time, I need to feed and take care of my baby. So, we moved in. This is the reality of motherhood as art. Our private life becomes public. We invite you to witness the joy, the anxiety, the mess, and the relentless multitasking of our daily existence. This exhibition contemplates motherhood while the raw, unpolished reality of it unfolds right in front of you.

The first time I saw a penis was at the age of 19.

I was walking around Iceland, and stumbled upon the Penis Museum.
Growing up in China, That was my first sex education. And my first time seeing a mature penis, in a jar, soaked in Formalin.
But that left me thinking, where is the vagina museum and the Clitoris museum?

So brace yourself for the sex education that I didn’t get to learn when I was 19.

Let’s take a look at this image.
This is not a penis. It’s actually a clitoris. A hyenas’s clitoris.
Elephants have similar clitoris, and it’s 40 cm long!

During mating, when the ladies feel like it, she retracts the clitoris and creates an opening that the male can inserts penis. Because of this, it is physically impossible for a male to force sexual activity on a female unless she is completely willing.

Both hyenas and elephants are matriarchal species, meaning they are organized around a social system where leadership and authority are predominantly held by females.
Their anatomy has influenced their social structure.
In their world, power dynamics look very different from the imbalances we often see in human societies.

It wasn't until 2 years ago, in 2022, that scientists found out snake's have clitoris.
These hemiclitores contain nerves and erectile tissue, suggesting they serve a reproductive function and are not just decoration.
Now we can consider mating in snakes is not about coercion or force but instead about stimulation, seduction, pleasure. But these clitoris were mistaken as scent glands for many years.

So why did it take so long to discover this? For centuries, science has been dominated by men, who weren’t as interested in the female anatomy as they were in the male anatomy.

We talk about the clitoris and the G-spot as if they’re myths. We accurately mapped the clitoris decades after we sent men to the moon, and 150 years after we mapped the penis!
In the Middle Ages, witch-hunting guides referred to the clitoris as the “devil’s teat” and claimed only witches had one.

So we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We set out to grow a living clitoris in a dish.

Here is the newly found, understudied science fact:
In Menstrual blood, there are stem cells, and they are pluripotent, meaning they can differentiate into specialized cells and grow into organs. What’s more, they can differentiate into the widest range of cell types compared to most other stem cells, making them exceptionally versatile.

So in the lab, we set out to see where this could take us. We collected our menstrual blood, harvested the stem cells within, differentiated or “turned them into” erectile cells and neural cells.

Then implanted these into the clitoris structure using 3D bioprinting.

These are some neural cells that grew from our menstrual stem cells.
With this, we are able to grow a clitoris that can both sense and think.

If it’s a living clitoris that can sense and think. Is it a sentient being?
Can it sense arousal and have pleasure?

Scientists have proved human brain cells in a dish can play the complicated game “Doom”.
What can a clitoris in a dish do?

She could swipe Tinder, literally “think with her clitoris”!

Is it the same as lab-grown meat?

Technically, it is. And ideally, you wanna put both in your mouth.

To follow the growth of this clitoris in a dish. Find us on OnlyFans! @sentientclit
We're flipping the script on bio-capitalism—using a platform built for objectification to reclaim narratives of sex, pleasure, and science.

Beyond the artistic inquiry, lab-grown clitoris could potentially be an organ implant for the more than 200 million women and girls alive today who have gone through genital mutilation. This could also bring help to transgender or intersex women seeking gender-affirming care.

The clitoris is not the only understudied part of the female anatomy.
Menstrual blood comes out from our bodies every month, a lot of times it’s painful, messy, and to some, disgusting. So naturally, I thought, there must be something interesting here!
So I pulled out a tampon and put it in front of my husband’s face, who is a scientist and my long-time collaborator. I asked him: ’What’s in this?’

To understand more, I began collecting my menstrual blood, and we used modern mass spectrometry to analyze the proteins inside.

We found many unique proteins that only exist in menstrual blood and not in normal blood.
Many of these proteins are linked to fertility, endometriosis, and cervical cancer.

That could become the key to long-term health tracking.
Without the need for needles, this blood that we already produce and discard every month can be our non-invasive way of monthly health checks.

Because I pipetted lots of menstrual blood, as you can imagine, I got very familiar with its odor.
So drawing on my artistic background, I made an olfactory piece called Menstrual Garden which gives you another way to visualize the science behind our research.

The three scent bottles contain the smell of fresh menstrual blood, stagnant menstrual blood, and menstrual pain with the scent of blood and cramp relief patches.

One bottle contains the top ten proteins found uniquely in menstrual blood.
I’ve enlarged and collaged them so you can see their intricate shapes and folding patterns.
Another bottle has an organ garden grown out of menstrual blood.

Our menstrual blood holds incredible potential. It may one day help grow life-saving organs. Currently, stem cells are typically collected through invasive methods like bone marrow aspiration or fat tissue biopsies, which require anesthetic medical procedures. In contrast, menstrual blood offers a non-invasive, accessible alternative for gathering stem cells.

Recent studies have shown that stem cells from menstrual blood could be used to treat conditions like Alzheimer's disease. By differentiating menstrual stem cells into neural cells to replace those that have died. Researchers have also cultivated heart cells from these stem cells to repair damaged heart tissue. I like to call it:
Using menstrual blood to patch a broken heart.

Every year, more than 20,000 people around the world are waiting for heart transplants. Now, imagine if a heart could be grown from our own menstrual blood, allowing for a treatment that not only bypasses invasive procedures but also reduces the risk of immune rejection.
I’m trying to grow a heart from my menstrual blood for my mother.

Two years ago, she suffered a heart attack. It was a painful reminder of how often women are overlooked in medical science. Her symptoms didn’t fit the typical profile for a heart attack—symptoms more often associated with men—and even doctors failed to recognize the danger. The delay in diagnosis has left my mom still unwilling to acknowledge that she has heart disease.

This experience inspired my partner, Cooper, and I to co-found a company, with the main mission to provide accessible, accurate, and affordable heart disease testing, and to coach people on prevention. So that people like my mom can get the help they need before it’s too late.

Like growing the clitoris, I used stem cells from my menstrual blood and differentiated them into heart cells. Using 3D bioprinting, we created a heart-like structure as a home for these cells to grow. One day, this will become a fully functioning organ as a gift to my mother, who continues to struggle with heart disease. Just as she once created my heart in her womb, I am giving her a heart grown from my own womb’s menstrual blood.

But that is not the only thing my mother gave me. I’ve already told you about the gender imbalances in science, but some of you may not know the gender imbalance faced by so many in China. During the one-child policy, about 30 million abortions happened when the families discovered the baby was a girl.

I wouldn’t exist in this world if my mom hadn’t insisted on saving me. And she spent lots of effort, time, and money to give me a great education, when others didn’t believe a girl deserved it.
Although my mom does not claim to be a feminist, she might be the best one I know.

It’s not enough to complain about these issues, but rather to invest in changing them.
She prioritized my education, and I have used that opportunity to the advantage of not just myself, but women at large.

I now aim to turn menstruation, a taboo and sometimes disgusting process, into a superpower. A superpower that can aid in making sex pleasurable to victims of genital mutilation, transgender women, and intersex women, as well as a non-invasive way to check overall health. It has shown progress in treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease. This superpower can decrease the number of people on organ transplant waitlists, and provide them with the life-saving care that they need.

But I am not naive. The world doesn’t seem to like it when women have superpowers.
Women have the power to give birth. They banned our freedom to choose.
When we have the power to grow organs,
Will it be banned? Will it be exploited?

What new body politics does this superpower create?
Can it create advantages?
Could this superpower tilt the balance of power between womb-holders and those without, as we’ve seen in societies like the hyena and elephant?

Invest in research that helps women, because it actually helps us all!

Against sublime Arctic landscapes, Li performs five deliberately absurd attempts to repair climate breakdown: refreezing glacier melt and returning it, cleaning ice, draining the ocean with a coffee cup, polishing a glacier, and sweeping snow. The gestures question the scale and hubris of geoengineering while staging human persistence in the face of planetary change.

A girl and a fragment of glacial ice age together inside an interactive VR narrative. Built from Matanuska Glacier satellite data and field recordings made in Alaska, the work compresses human and glacial timescales, making climate loss immediate while presenting care as a gesture against disappearance.