Meat Faces

Words by Aldith Gauci
Images by Gábor Koós

On identity, empathy, and the face as a contested site of being.

Reading the Face

My friend once told me I must be smart because of the proportion of my forehead to the rest of my face. She then explained that the space between my eyes confirmed my forehead’s suggestion. My friend, the daughter of a practitioner of Mien Shiang (面相)—a traditional Chinese practice of face reading—had learned how to read faces from her mother. In Mien Shiang, faces are read to deduce personality, health, and future.

In my part of the world, too, the face presents identifying features that signal who we are. After all, aren’t eyes the windows to the soul?

Numerous English expressions refer to facial features as indicators of personality—“highbrow” or “lowbrow,” for example. In 17th-century Europe, physiognomy proposed a relationship between our facial features and our personalities. Whatever its interpretation at the time, the underlying assumption was that something essential could be deduced from the shape of our faces. The face, then, becomes a signifier of personality.

From Symbol to Subject

In the 20th century, psychologists hypothesised about the importance of the mother’s face to a nursing infant, while philosophers have reflected on the role of the face in our understanding of self. From selfies to iconic portraits, the face—more than any other part of the human body—has retained its place at the centre of culture, including artistic practices. It is no surprise, then, in an age of selfies, Botox, and facial recognition software, that the face is treated as essential to the representation of identity.

The Empathic Image

Existential philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre writes that there is an innate sense of empathy for other beings with faces. I recognise this when I see someone in pain or fear and feel for them. I also recognise it when scrolling through hundreds of humanless images, only to find myself searching for a body—perhaps out of a need for familiarity or a relevance to my own gaze.

Drawing on this empathic interaction that a face can command, both fashion and ethnographic photography frequently use close-ups and frontal portraits, as if to suggest that capturing the face can capture something uniquely individual. Early 20th-century documentary photography operates similarly, decontextualising faces with blank or neutral backdrops and curated light. The result is a uniform visual context for diverse subjects—peoples, classes, and histories—inviting viewers to see them all, quite literally, in the same light.

These images construct a sense of universality—a shared human condition—transcending the face as a reference and crossing into the domain of flesh (Merleau-Ponty), the face as a continuation of the body, of the head (Deleuze and Guattari).

The Practical Face

The emphasis on the face as a signifier of identity underestimates its practical, physical functions: to eat, smell, see, and communicate things other than what we consciously portray. The visceral engagement of the face resists curation.

Sartre draws attention to this communicative function, describing the face as a practical tool for relaying overt messages, capable of communicating beyond its outward appearance. He refers to this as visible transcendence—the idea that the face is not only a visible marker of form but also a medium through which deeper communication takes place.

Deleuze and Guattari describe the signifying function of the human face as a white wall/black hole system, representing the interplay between external representation and internal sensoriality. The complexity of the face in its capacity for representation is crystallised in one of the most iconic portraits in art history: the Mona Lisa: the ultimate representational ambiguity of the face. Unlike a mask, the human face not only communicates but also integrates perception, sensoriality, and subjectivity. In doing so, it presents our continuously changing identity—the flux and plurality of who we are.

Artworks often engage with this dynamic, placing under scrutiny the shifting boundary between identity and perception.

Distortion and Ambiguity

Some artworks focus on distortions that reveal the modularity of the face, proposing identity as fluid rather than fixed. As a viewer, I am drawn to the various forms these artworks imagine—the multiple, amorphous states we might inhabit. I am not necessarily drawn to the final product of transformation, but rather to the very possibility of it: the open-ended question of what else a human face could be.

In the ambiguous space between concealment and revelation, viewers are asked to project their imagination onto what they see. These faceless or “ghost faces”—as archaeologists described the Chinese ceramic tripods of the late Neolithic period—create a gap for viewer engagement. The sameness across such faces foregrounds a shared human interiority.

Deleuze and Guattari describe face-making as an interplay between signifiance and subjectivity. In navigating these categories, artworks reveal the relationship between perception, sensoriality, and subjectivity—through faces that are perfected, distorted, or erased. They explore the space between what we look like, what we feel, and how we are perceived.

Ghost Faces and Embodied Identity

If, as Sartre and others have suggested, the face is a channel for communication, what is conveyed when the face is removed, hidden, and distorted? Distorting the face—the most privileged part of the human body—disconnects the viewer from empathic processes. Art which points towards a faceless humanity, or rather a beastly existence that lies behind the meat (Deleuze), beckons the question: where does the “self” lie within your meat body?

Looking at the distorted bodies of Francis Bacon’s paintings, for example, the viewer oscillates between feelings of recognition and monstrosity, provoking the viewer to, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, become clandestine—searching for identification elsewhere, away from the white wall/black hole system of the face.

The performances of Sankai Juku explore this transformation directly, presenting dancers as “ghost faces”—unidentifiable, indistinct. These performances invite the viewer inward, presenting the human body as a living sculpture. The Butoh dance movement, in which Sankai Juku participates, draws on internal states—fears, desires, and memories—offering a presentation of repressed experiences.

In Butoh, the face is contorted as dancers explore raw emotion, and often painted white, removing attention from individual identity and ego. In Sankai Juku’s performances, the white-painting renders dancers indistinguishable, undoing the hierarchy of the face over the body. The occasional flash of red fabric beneath the pale exterior gestures beyond the physical body, pointing toward an interiority.

In identifying with these ghost faces, I recognise a body that holds our shared desires and contradictions. The drive to see, empathise, and recognise ourselves in the distorted other leads to moments of self-recognition. Erasing the face calls into question the idea of individual identity.

Performances like Sankai Juku’s propose new compositions, shaped through shared corporeality. These artworks offer a chance to engage with otherness beyond the curated image of the self. To dismantle the face is to perceive through what Deleuze and Guattari call the body without organs.

Distorted faces thus invite a reconfiguration of perception—one that bypasses the familiar coordinates of the eyes, ears, and mouth in favour of a more diffuse, less legible encounter with the body.

As Henry Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn (1961), “My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known.”