At first glance, Jen Liu’s Cube of Meat (2026) resembles a Vanitas painting. A hyperrealistic block of red meat sits in a void, seemingly motionless, like a perfectly marbled allegory of mortality—until you notice the pulsation. The striated surfaces gently swell and deflate while sounds of slow breathing, dripping water, and keyboard typing echo throughout. What appears to be a still life is, in fact, a real-time generative 3D animation. Presented at the artist’s latest solo exhibition, “Pound of Flesh” at Silverlens, New York, the piece centers around a survey based on A Workers’ Inquiry (1880) by Karl Marx, which the latter had devised to acquire “an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class . . . works and moves.” 

Rather than addressing the 19th-century French proletariat, as Marx had, Liu designed her questionnaire for modern-day microworkers, asking them, “Do your wages help pay for your basic needs?” and “What do you most wish you had in your current employment situation?” These individuals handle small, tedious online tasks—such as labeling, refining, and sanitizing vast amounts of data—to train machine learning algorithms for top AI companies, usually on an erratic, on-demand basis and for meager earnings. Not only are their contributions unacknowledged, they are also obscured by the tech-utopian fantasy of absolute automation. Liu encapsulates this defective notion of fully self-operating AI within a chunk of raw Wagyu that respires, uncannily, until it begins to mold and rot and ooze liquid before bouncing back to its unexpired state. Then, without missing a beat, the cycle restarts.