Ani Liu: Eye Heart Womb

Ani Liu: Eye Heart Womb illuminates the lived experience of a working artist-mother who transforms the unseen labors of care work into visceral, technologically sophisticated art. From low-income housing to international exhibitions, Ani Liu’s journey defies her immigrant parents’ expectations. They pushed her toward science and security, she became a full-time artist. This is a portrait of a woman who inhabits the in-between: between East and West, between the ethereal and the cerebral, between personal expression and collective care.

Ani’s work is hypnotically beautiful—futuristic, meticulous, filled with wonder—yet beneath the technological polish lie tender and haunting details: perfectly red silicone lips glowing with microbial blooms that map mood and exhaustion; a glass pig uterus holding both human and pig fetuses, suspended between life and speculation; acrylic vials arranged like DNA strands, marking every feed and diaper change of a newborn. Ani’s most recent project emerged from the discovery of microplastics in breastmilk—a collision of the tender and the toxic that encapsulates her practice. Why do we regulate women’s bodies but not plastics? Through rigorous research and emerging technologies, she interrogates systems of control, examining the biopolitics of reproduction, gender, labor, and the invisible feedback loop between our bodies and our environment.

Rather than offering solutions, Ani embraces uncertainty—positioning art as a portal to deeper wondering, and motherhood not as a limitation, but as a force that reshapes how we understand labor, love, and what it means to build a better world.

Credits
Writer: Miao Wang
Producer: Miao Wang, Damon Smith
Executive Producer: Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Monika Navarro, Michael Kantor, Joseph Skinner
Director of Photography: Sean Price Williams
Editor: Miao Wang
Composer: Damon Smith
Sound Designer: Damon Smith
Music: Damon Smith

Plays in

IN BETWEEN WORLDS

These eight short documentaries follow people suspended between home and the loss of it, between tradition and transformation, and between the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to tell.