During the Han dynasty, small jade cicadas were sometimes placed into the mouths of the dead before burial. Their shedding shells were understood as a sign of rebirth, a passage into another order of continuity after death. Two thousand years later, Chinese London-based artist Yucen Liu carves jade into Bluetooth symbols (among others). It is another form of invisible transmission, though perhaps here the “afterlife” has been reduced to whether devices manage to recognise each other.
Both comic and tragic at once, the leap marks a broader transformation in the logic of symbols. What once organised relations between life, death, and the cosmos now organises relations between bodies, devices, and networks. Historically associated with purity, immortality, and imperial authority, jade carries a dense cosmological inheritance. Placed alongside the visual language of consumer electronics, jade ceases to signify authenticity so much as another technology of reverence.
Jade keyboard keys sit inside ghostly plastic armatures; folder icons and hyperlink manicules are rendered with the care once reserved for ritual objects. What reads like a dialogue between tradition and technology on the surface goes deeper to recognise that both participate in economies of reverence, touch, and fetishisation. The polished jade object and the engineered surface of the device both promise frictionless transcendence.
A small green jade cicada survives because the stone itself survives. But what survives the interface? The interface icon is designed for instant recognition and equally instant obsolescence. Forced into a material associated with durability, memory, and a lifespan beyond what is human, these symbols acquire an unexpected permanence. What emerges is not simply a contrast between ancient and contemporary forms, but a collision between temporalities. What interests Liu is not jade as cultural symbol alone, but stone as a form of temporal resistance. As he puts it, the work stages a collision between “extremely fast internet” and “extremely slow jade.”
In Liu’s own account of his making process, forms begin as sketches, pass through 3D modelling software, and are then routed through fabrication chains before being carved. The artisanal gesture is inseparable from computational planning, or if anything reliant upon it. The process folds one system into the other, re-inscribing digital operations into geological time.
The effect is subtly disorienting. Interface symbols inherit the structural role once occupied by mythological motifs, but they do so by withdrawing almost completely into the background of perception. Bluetooth, AirDrop, Wi-Fi: these signs no longer appear as images one actively reads, but as infrastructural conditions of access. Liu interrupts that disappearance by slowing the interface down until it becomes perceptible again. What is designed to vanish into use imposes weight, texture, and vibration. The digital thickens into sediment.
Within the Jade UI series, keyboard keys and folder symbols hover between sculptures, prototypes, and imaginative objects of desire. Their polished surfaces recall the visual grammar of consumer electronics — particularly the immaculate restraint of Apple product design, where objects appear frictionless, weightless, almost detached from labour altogether. Liu reproduces this seduction while simultaneously disrupting it. The objects are too heavy, too slow, too materially stubborn to function seamlessly. Desire encounters resistance.
Desire here is organised less around possession than fluency: the ability to move frictionlessly through systems that precede conscious thought. Because of this, the works are given both an era and a language, exposing how differently generations inhabit the same symbols (including future ones). Encountering them reveals one’s own degree of fluency within these systems, and how foreign or incorporated they may or may not be to the viewer. Born in 2002, Liu belongs to a generation for whom this language is ambient. The much-mocked ‘iPad babies’ are a cohort for whom digital operational surfaces were uniquely formative in ways that any older generation truly cannot fathom.
Formed through early and continuous exposure to screens, platforms, and networked logics, this generation does not encounter digital systems as external technologies; for them, the interface was environmental. To look at these works is therefore not only to interpret them, but to register how deeply one’s own perception has been formatted by similar systems. In that way, the works do not only age the artist himself; they age the viewer.
The E-Ware series extends this investigation into another register of circulation: the internet. Browser windows, inboxes, and search pages are rendered in mixed porcelain and plastic objects inlayed with blue-and-white ceramic motifs derived from traditional Chinese decorative patterns. Fragments of private digital life — emails, inbox traces, browser remnants — appear partially enclosed within ornate ceramic surfaces. They register as archaeological, as though contemporary interfaces had already become relics excavated from a future ruin. The effect is uncanny rather than nostalgic. One suddenly sees the browser window not as a transparent tool, but as a historically specific visual regime that may one day appear as remote as a ritual vessel.
Liu described these patterns almost as intrusions into the smoothness of the interface, contaminations that interrupt digital neutrality with historical residue. Rather than functioning as ornament, porcelain here introduces temporal drag. What appears instantaneous begins to accumulate sediment again.
The juxtaposition also connects two systems of global exchange. Porcelain once circulated through imperial trade routes as a luxury technology of surface and value; digital interfaces now circulate information through similarly expansive infrastructures of extraction and distribution. Liu does not present these histories as opposites, nor does he frame Chinese visual culture as stable authenticity set against technological modernity. Instead, both porcelain and interface design appear as systems for organising attention, desire, and circulation.
This tension between bodily memory and systematisation becomes even more pronounced in Liu’s medical-related works. Drawing from his own experiences Chinese medicine and clinical environments, he describes how smell operates as involuntary memory trigger. Working part-time in a Chinese medicine shop in London, the scent of medicinal herbs repeatedly returned him to earlier experiences of examination and anxiety. For Liu, memory is not narrative recollection but something lodged physically in the body, activated without consent.
That logic reappears materially in sculptures composed from the residue of more than one thousand doses of Chinese medicinal matter. What once circulated through the body as treatment hardens into geological accumulation. Here, the body is understood less as stable subject than as site of processing: diagnosed, measured, optimised, and archived through overlapping systems of care and regulation.
Liu avoids framing Chinese medicine as romantic counterpoint to Western clinical rationality. Herbal residue and medical apparatus appear within the same infrastructural field. Both operate through procedures of classification, measurement, and bodily management. The question is not whether one system is more legitimate or authentic than another, but instead how both regimes produce subjects through material practices of attention and control.
Across these works, Liu repeatedly returns to the notion of measurement. QR codes replace traditional ruler markings; interfaces become systems through which both bodies and images are rendered machine-readable. Vision itself appears increasingly organised through protocols external to human perception. One no longer looks freely so much as within calibrated systems of recognition.
What gives the work its particular charge is that it never fully positions itself outside these structures. Liu critiques interface culture while remaining deeply fluent within its aesthetic and operational language. He slows digital speed through materials that nevertheless retain the seductive precision of luxury design. He transforms symbols of frictionless connectivity into tactile objects while acknowledging that those objects will continue circulating within systems of visibility, consumption, and exchange.
Across these works, the viewer gets caught in the same circuitry the works expose, which is part of what makes them unsettling. If you grew up inside interface culture — tapping screens before you could write, recognising icons faster than faces — these objects hit differently. A carved Delete key or Bluetooth symbol doesn’t feel symbolic; it feels native, weirdly intimate, almost already inside you. Liu understands that recognition today is less intellectual than reflexive. Your body knows what these signs mean before you’ve had time to think about them.
And that’s the trap. The work makes you realise how much of your perception has already been preformatted by digital systems. You look at the sculpture thinking you are interpreting it, only to discover that the interface has been interpreting you for years. The viewer stands both outside and inside the system at once — critical of it, dependent on it, unable to fully separate from it.
What lingers is an eerie recognition that these symbols have become part of our emotional architecture as well as our societal material stuff. They organise memory, attention, desire, even bodily reflexes. Liu slows them down just enough for their strangeness to become apparent. In that moment, the invisible infrastructure of contemporary life slips briefly out of alignment with itself, becoming visible precisely where it was supposed to disappear.
Images courtesy of the artist
Yucen Liu
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