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My networking logic follows directly from my research question: I need to connect with people who can illuminate the tension between social mask and true self from different angles.

(a) Existing network resources

On a theoretical level, W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde’s writing on emotion and power, and Elisabeth Croll’s discussion of gender discipline placed on Chinese women form the academic foundation of this project.

On a practical level, I have completed interviews with three Chinese female artists and one Art Director.

Mu distinguished two kinds of dishonesty: dishonesty towards the audience, which can work as a creative strategy, and dishonesty towards oneself during the creative process. She admitted that her work tends to deal with things that can easily “pass” — and what I am questioning is exactly that checkpoint itself.

Zoe has a clear sense of double consciousness: she wants to express vulnerability and fear without filtering, while also being aware that the outside world holds deep-rooted assumptions about what Chinese female artists should be. One conclusion we reached together was: “the dishonesty that comes without thinking is, in itself, a form of honesty.”

Joi lives in the US. Notably, she does not experience a strong sense of double consciousness. She attributes this to both her family’s open-minded attitude and to having left China during high school. This enriches my research: the formation of a social mask is directly related to family background and the point in time at which someone leaves the traditional cultural context.

Art Director Lara Lussheimer introduced the idea of “research out and in”, that researching inward is just as important as researching outward. This speaks directly to the autoethnographic method of this project.

(b) Relationships yet to be established

In terms of independent publishing, I plan to reach out to Hato Press and Good Press. Both focus on self-published and independent printed matter and are among the most influential spaces in London’s zine community, to understand how institutions create space for this kind of expression. 

I also plan to contact the Young Curator Programme at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. They actively support emerging artists within a Chinese cultural context and are one of the few organisations that takes the creative struggles of young Chinese artists seriously as an institutional concern. I want to understand: do they observe structural difficulties around emotional expression and self-presentation in their curatorial process? And what do they believe art can do on this issue?

(c) Interaction plan 

I approach all of these connections as a CSM MA researcher, bringing a particular cross-cultural perspective — studying the emotional experiences of young Chinese women from within a Western art institution. This position makes me both an insider and an observer, which I think offers genuine value to institutions and researchers interested in East Asian experience.

WHAT

My research question is: How can art expose the fracture between self and cultural expectation? 

This project explores art as a magnifier, illuminating the gap between the social mask and the true self — and what does this tension reveal about the cultural expectations placed on young Chinese women? 

Art exposes self-suppression that has become normal in everyday life, making the mechanism that has been quietly running visible. More specifically: how does cultural context shape artists’ creative practice? And what forces keep certain things outside the work?

WHY

This research starts from a specific personal contradiction: my original direction was encouraging women to honestly express their inner feelings, but I found I couldn’t do that myself. That contradiction, as evidence, led me to my current research question. 

This self-protective mechanism of avoiding honest expression of the true self has specific structural roots. The Confucian cultural tradition treats emotional restraint as a virtue(Tu, 1985), and treats the expression of desire and personal feelings as a disruption to collective order (Hooks, 2010). At the same time, pressure around marriage and childbearing, expectations around family roles, and the cultural narrative of the “good daughter” together form an invisible system of discipline(Croll, 1995; Foucault, 1977). 

Currently, research on the emotional experience of contemporary Chinese women is relatively scarce. This research will contribute a concrete case to this area through creative practice.

HOW

The specific research methodology used in this project is autoethnography. The intervention will take the form of a zine. I will run two parallel tracks: one is interviews with young Chinese female artists; the other is an internal record of my own attempts and my reflections. 

The choice of artists to speak with will focus on Chinese female artists in their middle twenties, living and studying in the UK. The cross-cultural situation makes this double consciousness sharper — they face simultaneously the internalised conditioning from a Chinese cultural background, and the expectation from the Western art context for “authentic self-expression.” 

I will also build connections with curators and institutions that support the voices of underrepresented artists, helping me understand the specific processes and methods of creating space for creators. 

WHAT-IF

If this research succeeds, beyond recording the existence of a problem, it should make young women begin to question the forces that shaped their social mask: whose values it serves, and what cost it has had for us. 

This research will also meet resistance. On a personal level, those who have already internalised emotional suppression as a survival strategy may not welcome this research; on a cultural level, the mainstream narrative that emphasises collective order and treats personal emotional expression as weakness and uselessness, as well as certain traditional institutions that benefit from existing norms, are all restraining forces. Facing these forces directly is the precondition for the research to proceed honestly. 

Through this project I will build my network. The experiences and voices of myself and my stakeholders will enter a broader conversation and be taken more seriously. 

Bibliography

Croll, E. (1995) Changing Identities of Chinese Women. London: Zed Books. 

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. 

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. 

Hooks, b. (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. 

Tu, W. (1985) Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation. Albany: State University of New York Press. 

My mother wrote me a letter on every birthday before I turned 20. She always wanted me to have a perfect memory of each one. Those letters carried her love, her expectations, and her vision of the life she believed I should have. Reading them, I always felt warm inside.
But at some point, I started to dread spending my birthdays with my parents. Because it meant I had to go back to them, had to be a daughter they were satisfied with, otherwise I would be letting down my mother’s efforts and her good intentions. That contradiction: the love was real, and the fear was also real. I never knew where to begin to explain it. This is where this project truly starts.

I began to think back on works that could reflect these kinds of feelings. I wanted to know if anyone else felt the same way I did.
In Little Women, Jo sits in the attic and tells her mother: “I’m so lonely.” She has a warm home, loving sisters, people who care for her, and yet she is still lonely. Every time I reach that moment, I cry. That feeling of “having so much and still feeling something is missing” is very familiar to me.
Look Back touched me in a different way. That determination to give everything for the thing you love. I cried all the way through, but I couldn’t explain what moved me. Maybe because I can’t bring myself to be that all-in? Maybe I was mourning a version of myself I lost, or never really had? I don’t know. But it was precisely this inability to explain it that made me realise: some emotions are small, quiet, and unclear, yet very real. They deserve to be taken seriously.

Every time I encounter a work that truly moves me, I feel an enormous sense of happiness. Because in that moment I know: there are people in the world who share the same confusion, the same worries as me. To be seen, to be heard — that is a deep kind of happiness, and it makes me feel I am not alone.
There is a mechanism behind this feeling: you see yourself in the work, like looking in a mirror. That mirror reflects back the things you couldn’t quite explain or bring yourself to say out loud. So I want to make that kind of mirror for young Chinese women like me. I want to create more of these moments.

During the spring break, I talked with the young women around me. I didn’t do formal interviews, I just asked slowly and listened slowly, through everyday conversation. I found that what people cared about most fell into two areas: their future, and relationships. Some had just gotten their first job, and some had just graduated and were standing at the entrance to adult life, not knowing which way to go. Some had ended their first relationship, some had been betrayed, some were holding on to something painful and couldn’t let go. Every person’s story was different, but there was one thing in common: the roots of these confusions could almost always be traced back to the environment we grew up in, back to the process through which we were shaped into a certain kind of person, back to the invisible marks left by our families of origin.

This is the change I want to see — I want those emotions that have never been properly expressed to have the chance to be seen for the first time. I want young Chinese women to know that their small, quiet, tangled feelings deserve to be taken seriously. If someone encounters my work and says “this is exactly how I feel”, that will be enough. In that moment, the emotions that have been carried so quietly will no longer be lonely.

Bibliography

Fujimoto, T. (2021) Look Back. Tokyo: Shueisha.

Gerwig, G. (dir.) (2019) Little Women. United States: Columbia Pictures.

Nakamura, A. (2021) Tokyo Binkon Joshi. Translated by Fu Xu. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House.

Woolf, V. (1928) Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press.

From the very beginning of this project, I kept asking myself: what do I actually want to talk about? As I love film, music, and writing, I started looking back at the moments in these art experiences that moved me the most. The answer came quickly — a scene from Little Women: Jo sitting in the attic, saying to her mother: “I’m so lonely.” Every time I watch that scene, I cry. I more or less know what makes me feel that way, but I find it quite hard, or maybe I’m unwilling, or embarrassed to put it into words. I have a strong urge to talk about it, but whenever I try, I don’t know where to start.

Gradually I understood, these feelings I’ve been carrying but never said out loud are exactly what I want to talk about. In this film, I saw the push and pull of young women wanting independence but also wanting to depend on others, wanting to become themselves but still being tightly connected to their families.

I realised I don’t want to “solve” this tension, I want to give it a shape. I want to be a storyteller, to tell girls like me: “The feelings you carry inside, the ones you’re not sure anyone else cares about, they matter. You are not alone.”

I started to think about why I felt like I didn’t know where to start. I realised that most of the works that gave me a similar feeling of resonance came from a Western context.

As Gen Z Chinese women, we are in a very particular position. In East Asian collectivist culture, “independence” has never been simply about leaving home and becoming yourself. It is more like finding a balance between family expectations and personal desires. Psychological separation never has a clear moment of completion (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). At the same time, our generation is immersed in globalised content, exposed to a large amount of narratives from Western individualist frameworks: about the self, boundaries, and independence. 

This creates a very specific kind of confusion: the tension you feel is real, but when you look for stories or expressions that reflect your own situation, what you find doesn’t quite fit.

In the process of reading, I came across three texts that had a significant influence on me.

Hedva (2015) made me realise that there are structural reasons why these small emotions have long gone unseen. She points out that in a society where productivity is the standard, vulnerability, emotions, and those quiet inner states are systematically excluded from the definition of what is “important”. This made me understand that what I want to do is not just create emotional resonance, it is to fill a gap that genuinely exists and is genuinely needed.

hooks (2010), in the chapter “Crying Time”, argues that emotional expression has been seen as a threat to rational order within systems of knowledge. But she believes that emotion itself is a way of knowing the world. If we allow it to exist, suppressed knowledge may find its way out. This made me more certain: what I want to create is a space where this kind of knowledge is allowed to exist.

Lorde (1979) argues that the master’s tools will never bring about genuine change, and that real power comes from finding one’s own language and form. I realised that if I want to speak to the emotional situation of Chinese women, I must find a way of expression that truly belongs to this context.

These three texts all point toward the same thing: finding the language that belongs to your own situation is itself part of the creative work. At the moment, I am still thinking about what approach I should use to convey my message, perhaps moving image, perhaps writing. I don’t have a definite answer yet, but I know I want to create an experience that makes women like me feel seen. If someone finishes my work and says “this seems to be exactly how I feel”, that is enough.

Bibliography

Hedva, J. (2015) ‘Sick Woman Theory’, Mask Magazine, January. Available at: http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Hooks, b. (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1979) ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Kolmar, W.K. and Bartkowski, F. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Reader. 3rd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 15–16.

Markus, H.R. and Kitayama, S. (1991) ‘Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation’, Psychological Review, 98(2), pp. 224–253.