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Li Yao                                                                                                                                                               Archive    Shop    Information

Perfect Melon

The campaign





Perfect Melon is a “community-building” marketing campaign from the fictional Perfect Melon beverage corporation, presented as an interactive installation.  The corporation intends to cultivate a consumer community entirely mediated by the corporation itself.  For the campaign, the corporation hosts a VR flavor experience in which attendees enter a virtual pavilion floating above an infinite melon field and are tasked to find the “perfect” melon.  Attendees assess melons by slapping them, listening to their sounds, and sampling their flavors via a taste display.  Once they select a melon, their choice is folded into the corporation’s commercial beverage formula: a mix of all chosen melons.




Perfect Melon Co. is interested in how international food, flavor, and beverage corporations seek to distill experience and emotion into commodified flavors. This trend is an extension of capital realism: a state of reality that is molded by the products we consume and the commercial ecosystem ​(e.g. advertisements) we engage with. These concepts are well illustrated in Givaudan’s “engage your senses” campaign and in a quote from the Coca-Cola Company: “the product of the Coca-Cola Company is not Coca-Cola… In fact, the product of the Coca-Cola Company is advertising itself.”


Team Bio
The Perfect Melon team consist of members Jas Brooks, Gabby Luu and Li Yao, who came together through an Art and Science Seminar in the summer of 2018.

Jas Brooks is an artist and PhD candidate at the University of Chicago focusing on wearable devices that interface directly with our senses of smell and taste. Their artwork addresses intimacy, human relations, and the amplification of aesthetics via new modalities.

Li Yao is a Chicago-based VR/XR artist, organizer and educator. His work focuses on the way our sense of realities is shaped through architecture and corporation’s media campaigns. Li has exhibited in various venues including Altered Festival, The Wrong Biennale, Ars Electronica 2018, and Mykono Multimedia Festival. He received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and his BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2016.

Gabby Luu is an artist and graduate from the University of Chicago, where she studied Art History (BA ‘19) and the Humanities (MA ‘19). Her research interests include contemporary East Asian Art, and her Master’s thesis focused on intersections of the body, race, politics, and masculinity in Who’s the Daddy (2017) by Wong Ping. Gabby worked in both non-profit museums and a commercial art gallery, and continues to pursue a career in the arts.