TIME TRAVELER IN D-BLOCK follows a woman caught in a recurring cycle of death and rebirth across different historical periods. Beginning as a contemporary digital gig worker, she dies from exhaustion and reawakens as a 19th-century Chinese migrant sex worker in San Francisco, only to be transported further into the past to the courtly world of the Tang Dynasty. These historical scenes repeat in an endless loop. Drawing from Chinese microdrama aesthetics, the work combines 19th-century immigration transcripts with materials drawn from platform labor and ancient alchemical writings. The video uses mercury poisoning as a metaphor for forms of labor that depend upon disappearance. Memory becomes unreliable, and language starts to slip away. The protagonist moves through a collapsing cycle of historical time. Amid a breakdown into melodrama, a new voice emerges: Mercury, a fluid and unstable agent moving between eras. TIME TRAVELER IN D-BLOCK unfolds through loops, interruptions, and temporal dislocations, reflecting on labor, memory, and the historical conditions that render certain lives invisible.

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist whose work spans video, painting, performance, and sculpture. Through archival research and speculative narratives, she investigates diasporic Asian identities, labor, technology, and postcolonial economies, which inform the social and political conditions of contemporary life.