The Permanent and the Insatiable: Botanical City

As we kick off Earth Week, join Media Art Xploration and Onassis ONX for a salon exploring the life cycles of our urban environment. This evening features a conversation between artist Xin Liu and moderator Lumi Tan centered on Liu’s project, Botanical City.

🗓️ Monday, April 20, 6:00 PM 📍 Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway Floor 4, New York

The work reimagines the New York skyline as a sculptural model built from biodegradable plastic. As these structures break down, embedded seeds begin to grow, allowing growth and collapse to unfold in parallel. Reflecting a landscape where "the toxic leftovers of Industrial America" once defined the shore, Liu’s work uses material innovation to compress urban decay into a tangible experience of impermanence and renewal.

This event is presented in partnership with Media Art Xploration and Onassis ONX.

MAX is supported in part by the Simons Foundation International and administered by the Simons Foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division.

MAXlive and the MAXmachina laboratory program are supported in part the Ettinger foundation, public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, with additional support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation/EST, and the generous support of our individual donors. MAXmachina.

Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform dedicated to elevating innovative creators in the development, presentation, and distribution of new media artworks and immersive experiences. It provides artists and teams with capacity-building programs, incubation and applied research initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibition opportunities, fellowships, and partnership-driven collaborations through its hubs in Athens and New York City. This holistic engagement throughout the creative process enables artists to build worlds at the frontiers of AI, immersive, spatial computing, gaming, and other emergent time-based media. Onassis ONX provides a stage for creatives to imagine new futures by questioning the systems through which culture is produced, circulated, and remembered, actively fostering new forms of creative expression to meaningfully engage with audiences around the world.