Plastic Art + Plastic Science

Spring 2025
By Brandi Smith

Visitors to Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts can view an installation by artist Xin Liu that merges bioscience and art in a fascinating experiment titled “The Permanent and the Insatiable.”

The work is part of a multi-artist exhibition, “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” on view now through May 10, 2025. Exhibiting artists are Brandon Ballengée, Mel Chin, Tiffany Chung, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Michael Joo, Xin Liu, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Yoshitomo Nara, Roxy Paine, Garnett Puett, Sandy Rodriguez, Sarah Rosalena, Clarissa Tossin and Jin-me Yoon.  

For this commission, Xin Liu worked in collaboration with microbiologist Erika Erickson to create a sculpture made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics that represents the Houston skyline and Rice’s campus. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, which opened Jan. 24, 2025, the piece will be submerged in liquid enzymes designed to break it down, mimicking the natural process of plastic degradation. The result is a contest between engineered durability and biological intervention.
 

Liu, a former artist in residence at Rice’s Houston Asian American Archive, developed the concept after collaborating with scientists to send plastic-degrading bacteria to the International Space Station in 2018. “In materials science, we’re constantly creating materials that are indestructible,” she says. “They have super performance and are fire resistant and chemical resistant. At the same time in biosciences, we’re trying to engineer super organisms to eat exactly that material. We’re going to either end up with tons of these materials that can never be destroyed, or maybe one day we’re going to end up with a world that is consumed by some kind of super organisms.”

The sculpture’s enzyme is being produced in the lab of bioscientist George Phillips at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative, where Liu has worked closely with Erickson. 

“We started brainstorming about what might be possible, and then slowly this opportunity to work here, find lab space and try to accomplish the goals of the project came together,” Erickson says. She explained that the bacteria-produced enzyme used in the installation is a hydrolase, a type of enzyme that breaks down PET plastic by severing its chemical bonds.

“Plastics are a polymer, which is just a repeating chain of similar compounds, so the enzyme is able to break those down into their starting components,” she says. “The reason that this is exciting is that there’s the potential for this to be a way to do a better job of recycling than is currently available.”

Phillips, an associate dean of research at Rice, has worked extensively with enzymes that degrade polymers and says Liu’s installation could illustrate the potential of biological solutions for plastic waste. “These complex polymers are pretty hard to digest, but nature has done experiments over billions of years to figure out how to eat almost anything,” he says. “If the enzyme is active on this particular plastic, which we think it will be, the bacteria and the enzyme will win. It’s just a matter of how fast.”
 

The reason that this is exciting is that there’s the potential for this to be a way to do a better job of recycling than is currently available.

Phillips says he sees the installation as a perfect example of cross-disciplinary research in action. “I was very eager to have the lab be used to help Xin Liu and to have some kind of collaboration with the humanities and the arts, which I think is fun when you can branch out at a university,” Phillips says. “Universities shouldn’t operate in silos. I mean, we’re all humans. We’re all in this together. And I think when we share ideas and technologies, the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.”

Visitors to the Moody will witness a real-time battle between material resilience and enzymatic breakdown, raising questions about sustainability, human intervention and the future of waste management. 

“'Breath(e)' is an exhibition about climate change and social justice,” says Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody. “These pieces explore the ways our changing environment — through fires, floods, rising temperatures and different climate events — have an impact on communities and their social, economic and mental health.”

Originally organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibition has been adapted for Houston to highlight the specific environmental concerns of the Gulf Coast, including the commission of Liu’s work. 

Erika Erickson is a graduate student in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. George Phillips is the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of BioSciences, associate dean for special projects and professor of chemistry at Rice. 

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and guest curated by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, PST Fellow. The Moody Center for the Arts presentation is organized by Alison Weaver, Executive Director.