Entung Liu: Broken Breath Through Our Shiny Skin

The Immigrant Artist Biennial presents: Broken Breath Through Our Shiny Skin, a live 3-hour durational participatory performance by Entung Liu, curated by TIAB Founding Director, Katya Grokhovsky, as part of 2026 soft launch events during Upstate Art Weekend at N/A Project Space.

Manifested as a collective ritual for the digital age, the performance is situated in nature and invites people to reconsider the relationship among technology, our bodies, and precarious non-human life.

We’re used to smooth screens and seamless interactions nowadays. When a screen flickers, we assume something is wrong. In this work, the flicker becomes a sign of life. Twelve shifting colors pulse in rhythm with the simulated heartbeats of twelve animals, many of which are disappearing from our everyday awareness. It's not a malfunction — it's a pulse. A breath. A quiet insistence that something is still alive, even as it disappears. Their presence returns not through representation, but through sensation.

Participants connect their phones to a custom web application, receiving vibrations, light, and sound as part of a shared sensory system. Guided by a performer whose slow, sustained movements embody physical effort and presence, participants are invited into a state of heightened awareness—feeling the tension between seamless digital consumption and embodied experience.

The piece creates a pause—a space to notice your own breath, the ground beneath you, and the quiet signals passing through your hands. You’re warmly invited to step in and experience it together. 

Entung Liu's performance will take place within the context of “Everything is Everything” – a two-exhibition presentation curated by Lauren Hirshfield. The outdoors exhibition, titled In ter/situ will showcase artworks and installations orchestrated to interact with the surrounding property’s topography, composition, and/or histories. The indoor gallery will host creep is my kink, a five person exhibition exploring the tension between materials, systems, and identities when they fuse and transform. 

Upstate Art Weekend: June 25-29, 2026
TIAB Performance by Entung Liu: Saturday June  27th, 2-5pm