Jade Wen – The Name of Beauty

Concept

I want to reflect the fact that a lot of us are striving to meet the definition of beauty through my work. When you are hung by a rope around your neck, all you have to do in order to survive is to find something to stand on to keep your balance. The same idea applies to being pretty. As we are constantly being fed through media and online sources about what makes beauty and how many beautiful people have succeeded in their social and business life, it’s suffocating. And we work hard to survive in the aesthetic in fear of falling behind.

When looking at the first image, one cannot really understand what it means. One may guess that: someone is carefully weighing herself. But the second image of a flower hung with beauty products structured underneath helps explain: it’s illustrating the suffocation of becoming pretty and our endeavor to stand on something (using beauty products and dressing nicely) and survive, while the first image succeeds and the second fails the attempt. There is also detail that represents the modern situation: the phone in the first image and the phone charger that holds the flower are implications of influential digitalization; and social media and the internet are where we receive the numerous information, comparison, and appearance and social anxiety.

Process

When setting up and shooting my still life objects, I thought a lot about how to create a feeling that was strong, visually shocking and somewhat creepy. I used socks that are colorful and red that guides the viewer’s attention with the overall tint being contrastly greener. And originally, I didn’t put much emphasis on light. But a light only centering the object gives a stronger emotions (I personally think it’s like a murder scene, or a prisoner being execution).

Therefore, I turned off the light of the room and shed light on the main object–the flower and the foot. When I photoshopped the second image, I found a function called Threshold that could make it only black and white that gave a big contrast to the lighting, but at the sametime remained the color of the flower, the main object.

Conclusion

Until now, except the idea that connected the two images, the visual aspect didn’t do the same. If I had more time, I would think of some ways to make the two compositions look like a set, maybe in terms of color, consistent elements or patterns.