The Artist Who Lived Naked with Hundreds of Pigs
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You look in disbelief. Are you really seeing what you think you are? It is a woman (Miru Kim), nose to snout, skin to skin, nude, with hundreds of 500-pound pigs grown in an industrial farming barn.
Yet there is a strange beauty about the scene, a sense of oneness between the pigs and the woman. The sight is spectacularly surreal; it's something that seems impossible – but why?
Apart from the nudity, it is the conditions the pigs are kept in that jar. The realization that they are sentient beings – animals, yes, but not so different from ourselves.
Discussing the pigs' conditions Miru told us: "These industrial environments are so desensitizing in that you, even if you are an animal lover, become complaisantly accepting of the fact that the live beings are only raw materials for mass commodity production. This needs some serious questioning."
As Miru puts it: "Through the sensations of skin on skin, living bodies in the external world are formed, in relation to the self. When two bodies come in contact–each of them touching and being touched at the same time–the souls meet and interweave on the skin, and the subject and the object become one."
This closeness between humans and pigs is not so unusual when you start to think about it. As suggested, our skin is almost the same, and touching it, being near it while nude yourself, blurs and extinguishes the barriers.
As Miru says: "As I lay down next to a sow weighing five hundred pounds, I felt the warmth travel from the soft underbelly of the animal into my bare right thigh. Two bodies mingled momentarily, in the skin on skin contact. I could no longer reason whether I was feeling the pig's abdomen on my thigh, or the pig was feeling my thigh on her abdomen. The line between the subject and the object were obscured, and two souls mingled on the plane of contact."
Talking about her unique experience, Miru says: "I walked along the corridor of the standard-sized barn containing about twenty-four hundred hogs. Soon they came back up to the fence and started to poke their noses in curiosity. They had seen a new visitor and proceeded to examine her.
Pig eyes are remarkable. They see right into the eyes of a human being. When they were looking at me, exposed before them, surrounded by them, I could not read their gazes, but they were somehow shockingly familiar.
There was no language to bridge that disparity – the mysterious gap between the gaze of a pig and that of mine. But when I mingled with them with my skin, the gap momentarily closed in, as if I had forgotten my own language. My words were lost, and I felt the swinish grunts resonate inside me."
Miru Kim
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