Mudai (London Design Festival 2023)

I admire the scientific achievements of humanity. However, as time goes by and I had the realisation that all things possess a spirit, my long-held beliefs started to be defeated easily. Perhaps the process of growing up is often accompanied by a sense of rebellion, where an immature soul fight against its surroundings atmosphere to prove himself, but we also find redemption and liberation within this development of self-rebellion. “Interspecies talking” aims to point out the controversial theme between human progress and other species.

This is a series of small-scale installation pieces, each representing the metaphorical anthropocentrism and species discrimination embedded in various human experiments. Mice are the most common laboratory animals, so I thought of crafting a mouse embryo with a massive human heart, symbolising the cruelty of chimeric bio experiments. The uterus of a pig could nurture many lives; a human embryo nurtured by a pig's uterus can represent the imposition of human surrogacy onto animals. The previous artist, Ani Liu, also made a similar statement in her work "The Surrogacy". The experiment of reviving the woolly mammoth is well-known, and what does it represent if not the pinnacle pursuit of prehistoric life by human science? An embryo of a woolly mammoth nurtured by a human womb can symbolise the seemingly "noble" respect humans show to science. The panda, as an endangered species, garners significant attention; I hope to create a several panda embryos, signifying the differential status humans ascribe to endangered and non-endangered species.