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.
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.
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