The Guinea Pigs

Yuhanxiao (Maggie) Ma

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Yuhanxiao (Maggie) Ma is a multimedia artist and PhD student in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of speculative fiction, science, and ethics. Through sculptural works, multimedia installations, speculative documents, and image-based practices, she examines tensions between care and control, visibility and interpretation. Her work stages subtle disruptions within familiar systems, inviting viewers to question how authority, evidence, and identity are constructed.

The Guinea Pigs (2024), developed at SVA's Bio Art Residency, are SLS-printed sculptural figures from a larger exhibition examining pharmaceutical trust. The figures are composited from averaged facial data, referencing the populations most frequently recruited into offshore clinical trials — bodies selected for their legal vulnerability rather than their likeness to the intended patient. Each sculpture places the human body at the threshold between person and test subject, asking who gets to stand in for everyone else.