4D Baby, part of an optic illusion installation
Copyright 2026, Jiabao Li and Fumiko Futamura (Mathematician), All rights reserved.

Artist Jiabao Li’s solo exhibition Womb Wetware is currently on view through August 22nd at San Francisco’s TIAT (The Intersection of Art and Technology) gallery. On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Li along with four other artists convened in a hybrid event at the gallery, two in-person and two on Zoom, to present a panel discussion, “Motherhood as Medium,” which explored the intersection of pregnancy, birth, technology, reproduction, and mothering.* Through shared video and imagery, the artists offered audience members a look at their latest work, while visitors had access to Li’s work onsite. All of the artists examined issues related to how pregnancy and birth are treated in the arts and by society more broadly.

Jiabao Li presented discussed several of her projects that a part of her Womb Wetware exhibit. Li’s primary focus is on the intersection of pregnancy, motherhood, and technology,  and some of the artworks that she spoke about and which were available to audience members included her Super Mom Training Gym, a video game that she made when she was nine months pregnant by using a 3D body scan of herself as the player character. The game satirizes societal pressure on mothers to appear effortlessly capable, or superhuman, while they are pregnant. In reality, Li talked about how she could barely bend down to tie her shoes when she was in her third trimester. But in the game, her pregnant self can jump, leap and flip. Li also discussed AI Mom, her interactive piece available onsite where visitors choose and converse with an AI mother. The piece, which includes tone sliders, allows spectators the opportunity to choose the type of mom they would like to hear speaking. Li’s Rock Womb, Lotus Womb, also available to view onsite, is a very different type of piece, comprising a series of small figurines through which the artist weaves mythological themes related to virgin births, miraculous conceptions and pregnancies across cultures. These connect ancient ideas of reproduction without the body to today’s biotech ambitions related to pregnancy and birth.

One of the other artworks that she did not discuss at length was her 4D Baby project, part of an optic illusion installation she created with mathematician Fumiko Futamura, which included several pieces, one of which is available above. On the object label next to 4D Baby, Li and Futamura explain:

Pregnancy is a four-dimensional transformation. Duchamp had Rrose Sélavy as a female counterpart, a fourth-dimensional version of himself. When a penis is turned inside out, it becomes a vagina. When Duchamp is turned inside out, he becomes Rrose. What, then, is the fourth-dimensional version of a pregnant body, of me? In space, turning a pregnant body inside out brings the baby out. In time, that same transformation is birth.

This installation uses optical illusion to stage that shift. From a distance, the belly appears convex and the baby is outside. As the viewer approaches and moves to the side, the belly reveals itself as concave and the baby slips back inside. In another variation, the baby appears outside when viewed from an angle, but when the viewer moves directly above the belly, the baby is inside. Distance becomes pregnancy. Movement becomes birth. Space becomes time. By walking away from the sculpture, the viewer performs the act of birth. 

For the purposes of visualizing birth, pregnant viewers can look at 4D Baby and envision nurturing the fetuses within their bodies. The lighting and feeling of Li and Futamura’s 4D Baby is one of lightness, softness, and glow. Visualizing the unborn child, those who are pregnant can imagine their own fetus basking in a glow within their own wombs.

Jiabao Li’s Womb Wetware exhibit is on view at the TIAT through August 22nd. More images from the show are available below. For more information on Jiabao Li and the artists present at the August 6th TIAT event, see their individual websites: Yoon Chung Han, Jiabao Li, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Sputniko!

*A small portion of the material from this post is also found in another review I wrote of the 4-artist panel Motherhood as Medium and Jiabao Li’s Womb Wetware exhibit, which I attended on August 6th in San Francisco. That review may be found here.