Pound of Flesh

Jen Liu excavates a haunting parallel: the invisible labor sustaining our digital present finds its mirror in the erased histories of Chinese migrant women who entered the United States between 1850 and 1899. Liu researches immigration case files from the Port of San Francisco, each containing the same fabricated story—women coached with scripted accounts of being born in San Francisco, visiting China, and now coming home. Their ability to enter and stay in the country depended on their invisibility.. Here, Liu paints portraits that refuse us the face. Instead, we encounter the backs of women's heads. Contemporary microworkers—the unseen humans training AI—operate under similar conditions of enforced anonymity. Liu surveys these workers, then feeds this data into an animation that displays a body reduced to its single extractable function. Both exist within economies that demand their labor while engineering their disappearance. These portraits ask: what does it mean to depict someone who was never meant to be seen?