Annihilation explores edibility, emerging from the carnal seduction of animal flesh, 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, Yukang Tao engages 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, Yukang Tao 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?

The project unfolds through a five-stage digital simulation from Stunning, Bleeding, Evisceration, Chopping and Cultivation, where I embody a cybernetic, semi-posthuman version of myself subjected to a reimagined slaughtering process by Blender. Each stage represents a distinct phase of both biological and systemic disintegration, paralleling the way capitalist structures process both human and non-human entities into commodities. Central to the work is the use of handcrafted textile sculptures, created from materials such as loofahs, synthetic fabrics, and silicone, designed to mimic fragmented and hybridized human-pig anatomical forms. These sculptures are then digitized through 3D scanning, a process that captures their intricate textures and spatial presence. Once scanned, the sculptures are imported into Blender and transformed into landscapes and environments within the animation itself. Additionally, I incorporate AI (Kling) to generate video clips derived from the original footage of textile sculptures, creating a recursive cycle where the organic and artificial, authentic and simulated, continuously rupture and reconstruct one another.