Yukang Tao

Research Proposal: Edibility, emerging from the carnal seduction of animal flesh, is disguised as the aestheticization and ethical consumption of corpses. This notion ubiquitously transcends brutal slaughter and exploitation of animality, yet it remains inherently advocates and architects of this capitalistic hierarchy. How can we, as semi-posthuman beings, dismantle and reconfigure the normalized subjectivity of slaughter? 

Drawing on Amber Husain’s Meat Love, which deconstructs the cultural and symbolic consumption of meat, I engage with the slaughter of pigs as a potent metaphor for the exploitation of both human and non-human bodies within capitalist systems. Husain’s critique offers an entry point into the broader cultural representations of meat, where desire and death integrate in an unsettling symbiosis that mirrors capitalist logics of consumption. 

Through those theoretic insights, I try to reveal how the capitalist society disguises the brutality into a spectacle of pseudo-mercy, where death is sanitized and marketed as ethical and aesthetic. This process obscures the violence inherent in consumption, ultimately normalizing the exploitation and objectification of all living beings. But there is something more complicated underneath the brutality from social hierarchy, we as a part of this, we unconsciously and inadvertently become architects and advocates for the whole capitalist operation. Then, the first question came out: How can we escape from the capitalistic justification of everythings’ value system? Why should there be a “loser” based on dominant gentrifications’ rubric? What is the proper position for myself nowadays?

Bio: Yukang Tao (b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the fields of electronic arts, animation, video, and performance. Yukang’s works have been shown internationally at such venues as SIGGRAPH 2024, ISEA 2024, 18th Arte Laguna Prize Shortlist and Winner, Italy; II Edition 99 Future Blue-Chip Artists by Artsted; 3rd SETA Festival “Mitologie Digitali” at  Saletta Campolmi, Italy and Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum, The Holy Art Gallery, PH21 Photograph Gallery, LossenArt Gallery,  CICA Museum, RuptureXIBIT Gallery, Kunstarkaden Gallery etc. While all of his artwork alludes to the concept of gender and observes the relationship between technology, nature and humanity, it also encompasses themes such as surveillance and self-absorption of society in media. It becomes a code translated by the viewer based on their experiences and views born from different perspectives in time, culture, and ethnicities. In his work, gender, power, and society are intertwined through the most rational technology, analyzing sensual human topics by data. Art and technology, virtual and accurate, the boundaries begin to blur and combine to form a new utopia.