The Labels
2017
30x40 cm Inject print,A4 Questionnaire
2017
30x40 cm Inject print,A4 Questionnaire
The focus of this project is on the complex interplay between labels, stereotypes, and self- identification. I am often struck by the ease with which others place you into categories— casually or violently, with desire or disgust. How do these labels, once superimposed, begin to dictate, or even reshape, who a person feels she is or can be? What does it mean to have a set of ideas projected onto you before you’re seen as a person? And how do those ideas coalesce into an identity that others assume you embody?
To unpack this, I created a survey that collated the labels that have been or can be applied to me. Some are identities, some are descriptors, some are judgments: “female,” “Taiwanese,” “lesbian,” “art major,” etc. Respondents were asked to engage with these terms viscerally, to draw the image that came to mind when they saw each one. From these drawings, interpretations, and projections, I was able to glean a composite of sorts, a map of how stereotypes congeal around a body, how imagination is made into categorization, and how representation ossifies into reduction.
I then asked respondents to stage photographs with me, setting my body up as one of the other “things” in their imagined scene. This awkward collaboration was discomfiting but illuminating in its foregrounding of the uneasy line between agency and objectification: even when I consented to be an active part of the image, the frame was ultimately organized by their projections. The resulting staged portraits open a dialogue around the making of identity, the process of stereotypes calcifying into labels, and how individuals walk the line between recognition and definition.
The Labels
2017
30x40 cm Inject print,A4 Questionnaire
To unpack this, I created a survey that collated the labels that have been or can be applied to me. Some are identities, some are descriptors, some are judgments: “female,” “Taiwanese,” “lesbian,” “art major,” etc. Respondents were asked to engage with these terms viscerally, to draw the image that came to mind when they saw each one. From these drawings, interpretations, and projections, I was able to glean a composite of sorts, a map of how stereotypes congeal around a body, how imagination is made into categorization, and how representation ossifies into reduction.
I then asked respondents to stage photographs with me, setting my body up as one of the other “things” in their imagined scene. This awkward collaboration was discomfiting but illuminating in its foregrounding of the uneasy line between agency and objectification: even when I consented to be an active part of the image, the frame was ultimately organized by their projections. The resulting staged portraits open a dialogue around the making of identity, the process of stereotypes calcifying into labels, and how individuals walk the line between recognition and definition.
The Labels
2017
30x40 cm Inject print,A4 Questionnaire