Either/Or
Eunsoon Yoo
Ten years ago, a cooking show featured “aejeo” (애저, 애豬), a term referring to a stillborn piglet. The piglet, with no hair on its pores, appeared as if it were asleep, lying as though cradled in its mother’s embrace. In the same episode, they also showed a pig carcass that had been neatly sliced in half from the head to tail. The hosts only emphasized how rare and fresh these ingredients were. It is striking to think that such graphic depictions of pig carcasses were openly broadcast on a show just ten years before 2024.
When we encounter pork or beef as ingredients, we often overlook that these were once whole, living beings. Capitalism divides production from consumption and accelerates the division of labor in the production phase to maximize efficiency and generate profit through distribution and processing. In this compartmentalization process, human ethical responsibility disappears, leaving only the pleasure of consumption for the consumer. Through her GAIA series, Jaeeun Shin restores these deliberately erased aspects of the process, questioning human responsibility.
1. Quasi-Divine Existence
GAIA Part 1: Inflammation, exhibited at the Incheon Art Platform in 2020, began with a miniature version of Tower of Silence, Pink, created in 2019. After learning about the repeated culling of live pigs because they pose a threat to humans—justified by the claim of preventing potential harm, although the animals had caused no actual harm—she installed a tall cement pillar at the Incheon Art Platform with an actual pig carcass buried beneath it. Visitors observed this installation from the same height as the top of the pillar while eating hamburgers made from pork patties. Eating a mound of flesh made from animals like the dead pig lying before them must have felt unusual and grotesque.
The red carpet, starting from a miniature version of Tower of Silence, Pink, extends across the exhibition entrance to Black Fountain (2019), where a black, oil-like liquid gushes forth. This points out the irony of burying pigs while relentlessly extracting oil, a lucrative resource, to its very end. From GAIA Prologue (2018) to GAIA Part 3: Twins (2021), the artist wrote parodic texts based on the Bible in the catalogs, along with prefaces and descriptions of her works. These texts tell stories about the virgin as an omnipotent creator, the birth myth of a twin pig and human, incestuous relationships between the virgin and human, a civilization cunningly led by humans, and pigs used as sacrificial victims. These narratives unfold in ways that are sometimes proverbial and sometimes humorous. They sharply criticize the situation where humans, as if possessing the (nearly identical) omnipotence of the virgin, destroy and control the environment and the Earth, exposing the anthropocentric hierarchies they have created. In GAIA Part 1: Inflammation, the artist examines the cycle from pig to oil from an external perspective, presenting humans as universal beings driven by capitalist desire. In the installation, The Pure, pink ink is layered so it becomes progressively clearer as it rises. Similarly, humans, as consumers, face pork or oil in its most purely refined form. Through this work, the objects—products created through the death of life, disassembly, processing, and distribution—exist under the illusion of the omnipotence of humanity.
2. Aesthetic Existence
In her solo exhibitions GAIA Part 2: White (2020) and GAIA Part 3: Twins (2021), the artist focuses on the flesh, blood, and organs that emerge during the butchering and dismembering of pigs, positioning the pig as an object and the human as a subject on equal footing. The artist does not seek to evoke sympathy by exposing human cruelty. Instead, like the surgical light fixture installed at the entrance of GAIA Part 3: Twins, she aims to fully expose the exploitation system that capitalism has long concealed while withholding moral judgment on it.
The pure white space frequently contrasts with the red flesh of the pig in her pieces. Strange Dream (2020) displays a plastic bag filled with 250 kilograms of blood collected after slaughter at a slaughterhouse which was set against the white walls of the gallery. Similarly, the video Rhythm (2021), which shows a butcher dismembering a pig while wearing surgical attire, was filmed in a white sterile-like room. The determination of the artist to capture each moment goes beyond mere disgust or self-loathing regarding the violence committed by humans, leading to an aesthetic moment of realization. Here, aesthetic value does not refer to human pleasure or indulgence from an anthropocentric perspective. Humans have long justified their right to breed, dominate, and consume other animals by asserting intellectual and functional superiority. We have dichotomized values into nice and bad, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, positioning themselves in the realms of nice, good, and beauty while relegating animals to bad, evil, and ugliness. By relentlessly showcasing what humans deem harmful or repulsive, the artist shakes the rigid beliefs that uphold such binaries and calls for reevaluating values that have long been devalued. The work Perhaps (2021), a close-up of the eye of a pig just ten minutes before slaughter, captures the moment when the pig, only merely a passive object of the viewer’s gaze, shifts into a subject that can look back, thereby questioning the hierarchical relationship between humans and animals.
3. Ethical Existence
In the solo exhibitions GAIA-Digestive System (2023) and GAIA-Synthesis(2024), the artist experiments with creating a cyclical network that moves between the micro and macro, and between the human and non-human. These cycles include Styrofoam, mealworms, chickens, and humans; food waste, soldier flies, whiteleg shrimp, excrement, photosynthetic bacteria, whiteleg shrimp, and humans; and food waste, soldier flies, excrement, fertilizer, rice, and humans. Throughout this process, the artist carefully intervenes at each stage, personally caring for and coexisting with these elements to form a temporary community. While designing GAIA-Digestive System, the artist had not initially planned to raise chickens. However, due to concerns over the safety of mealworms that had consumed Styrofoam, chickens were added to the cycle as a necessary link. These three lives, named Cherry, Jackson, and Nana, became part of the artist's life for three months, during which they encountered many unexpected situations. Although these old chickens, having completed their roles as parent stock, were spared from immediate culling thanks to the artist, they are ultimately destined to die and be made into sausages.
Animal rights activists oppose the sacrifice of non-human life within the capitalist production system, striving to sever parts of nature’s cycles. In contrast, Jaeeun Shin deliberately places humans into the cycle, holding them accountable. However, unlike in GAIA Part 1: Inflammation, here humanity is neither omnipotent nor a passive observer safely distanced from the scene, nor a unilateral perpetrator wielding life-or-death power. Within the cycle, humans act as caregivers, producers, and consumers, practicing ethical food consumption. By restoring the intense acquisitive process that precedes mere consumption—a process that capitalism has long concealed and continually distanced—the artist raises complex questions that transcend the issue of consumption, extending to the fundamental question of how to live. Humans cannot solve every problem; we have existential limits. Though we believe we make choices, we are, in fact, inseparably part of the cycle.
This approach diverges from how artists like Damien Hirst and Wim Delvoye use animals in their work. Whereas they ultimately treat animals as tools within their art, Jaeeun Shin sidesteps this critique by incorporating even humans into the cycle. Through her work, she invites a careful examination of the complex multilayered systems constructed by humanity. Rather than uncritically accepting universally held answers, she prompts a fundamental existential reflection on how we should live.
