Ang Siew Ching | High-Rise Pigs

ANG SIEW CHING
High-Rise Pigs

film, 15 min
2025

“High-Rise Pigs” is an essay film that examines the production of pigs in industrial settings. Set against the backdrop of towering 26-story high-rise pig farms in China, the film unpacks the technologies of mass reproduction that attempt to control how humanity thinks of pigs. The work traces these architectural interventions back to the 19th-century multi-story slaughterhouses of Cincinnati, positioning modern buildings as massive “digestive tracts” that process animal bodies. By relying on models, diagrams, and mediated images, the film highlights how the living pig often functions merely as “logistical flesh” within a larger architectural structure.

Through the work, Ang Siew Ching invites viewers to confront the uncomfortable gap between the pig produced as industrial biomass and the pig as a living entity. By exploring architecture as a site of digestion and metabolism, the film challenges us to reconsider the profound, often invisible, ways in which animal lives are woven into the physical and economic sustenance of modern human populations.

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs

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» GET TO KNOW THE ARTIST «

Ang Siew Ching was born in Singapore; she lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, and Singapore.

Ang Siew Ching works primarily in film, examining the tension between culture, nature, and infrastructure and exploring how lands have been shaped, bent, and destroyed by humans in their pursuit of development. Her films portray landscapes continually reshaped by human intervention, reflecting the so-called Anthropocene’s relentless modification of the natural world, presenting a restless landscape, never at peace with itself, reshaped again and again to the detriment of non-human lives.