Yingyao Zhao
A dark machine landscape lit in red, with glowing eye-like lights around a reflective central column. Play film · 1:54

03 / 03

Silent Order

Year
2026
Medium
3D modeling · Visual design · Unreal Engine 5 · Animation
Film
1:54 · Vimeo

In contemporary society, many systems, platforms, and mechanisms claim to care for women’s well-being. In reality, they standardize and streamline complex female experiences to make them manageable and predictable.

This work constructs a metaphorical “black box system” to show how “care” becomes a logic of cost control through three operations: removing choices to save time, directing consumption to cut costs, and suppressing controversy to reduce public attention. Each operation is presented in a sleek, efficient visual style that mimics modern technology and governance.

The work exposes how the idea of “women’s well-being” has been used to discipline women’s needs and to shrink social investment, tearing open the facade of care to reveal the power dynamics beneath.

Through a cold, precise visual language, it questions the control structures hidden behind a guise of goodwill, and refuses to reduce women’s needs to manageable, reducible costs.

Process

Background

Have you noticed how women's welfare is handled in everyday life? Mechanisms promoted as "women's benefits" are common in public and commercial spaces, yet they rarely address women's actual needs.

A supermarket aisle with a sign reading "Feminine Needs" above shelves of products.
Women's needs, labeled and placed in the corner of a shelf.
A packet of sanitary pads inside a black plastic bag.
Sanitary pads, handed over in a black plastic bag.
The door of a baby-care room with a glass panel and a pictogram.
A baby-care room with a see-through door.
Four photographs of cramped baby-care rooms with worn furniture.
Baby-care rooms, small and run-down.
A closed baby-care room door with a sign asking visitors to contact staff.
A baby-care room that has never been used: "please contact the staff or call…"

Interview

"When buying sanitary pads, do you specifically ask for a black bag? Why? Do you think it is for privacy, or out of embarrassment?"

There's no need to specifically give me a black bag. If a black bag is given to me by default, I'll take it; if it's given to me on purpose, I'll say I don't need it. It is a sense of embarrassment, for sure. I also wouldn't use black bags for other daily necessities.

Interviewee

Research

Many of the mechanisms labeled "women's welfare" do not truly respond to the complexity of women's needs. They form a disciplinary system aimed at cost control, risk avoidance, and the containment of disputes.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle: genuine needs are replaced by superficial appearances, and care is reduced to a visual spectacle and a promotional symbol.

Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems: modern social systems pursue self-closure, efficient operation, and reduced complexity.

Artist references: Studio Tomás Saraceno's Hybrid Webs, on how society is woven into a highly fragile networked system; and Ryoji Ikeda's data.tron and test pattern, in which data is transformed into perceptible images and sound.

Mind map

The idea: a black-box system whose three operations (eliminating choices, directing consumption, and containing disputes) convert women's real needs into manageable costs.

Black-box system

Care → cost control

Delete selection

Compress time costs

Computable

controllable

Guide consumption

Optimize economic costs

Care as cost control

Encapsulate controversy

Reduce social attention

Governance and capital

The black box

The black box is the control core of the whole system: the top-level logic of cost control, and the command center that integrates its three modules of deleting choices, guiding consumption, and encapsulating disputes. Visually, it represents the ultimate black-boxing of the entire system.

Gray 3D models of the black box, its columns, an inner maze, and roots growing through the frame, with red labels.
Roots grow within the framework; columns surround the box and collect information; a winding maze inside aggregates it and issues instructions, while from outside the complex structure is simply masked.

Scene design

Gray 3D model of tangled tubular forms above a platform and a cylindrical tower.
Cost screening. A sophisticated visual-physical system of entangled, directive tubes converts women's "inconvenience" and "shame" into quantifiable commodities and consumer directives, for maximum economic benefit and minimum social cost.
Gray 3D model of a spider-like machine with long jointed arms around a central column.
A simple, efficient "standard solution". By removing the right to choose, complex needs are compressed into controllable, standardized processes that minimize time costs.
Gray 3D models of a hanging machine with trailing cables, a control cabinet, a wide conical shell, and a ring of pod-like seats.
Controversy capture and encapsulation hub; public opinion guidance and information control; phenomenon concealment and isolation shell; individual discipline and passive acceptance terminal. Through capturing, masking, and guiding, the contradictions of women's needs are wrapped in the guise of "care".

Stills

A symmetrical corridor of glowing blue and pink light panels reflected in a glossy floor.
A vertical machine wrapped in streaks of blue light.
Black cables converging on a pale mechanical device seen from below.