CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibitions

Teacher Name: Dr. Burnstein
Grade: Senior

Materials: Canon EOS Rebel T7, Adobe Photoshop
Dimensions: 8” × 12”

Artist Statement: My photography revolves around my coming-of-age experience as an Asian-American girl. In my culture, the ultimate goal for a young daughter is to achieve womanhood—to blossom into an elegant and pure lady—and motherhood—to create buds from one’s own bloom. However, the unfortunate reality that transpires behind the scenes, particularly menstruation and harrowing self-esteem issues, often goes unnoticed and unresolved. Moreover, as the eldest child, I am weighed by the greatest expectations of achieving upward mobility for my family. Consequently, my passion for the arts was never fostered, and quite frankly, never approved of.

As an act of reclamation, I combined photography and the subject of my upbringing to shed light on the raw events of my life. For this reason, my works are self-portraits, with the exception of the piece All Grown Up, in which my 5-year-old sister is a stand-in for myself when I was her age. To elaborate, All Grown Up speaks to menstruation’s representation of one maturing into womanhood, and how it prematurely shot me into the world of sexuality, despite being at the relatively pre-pubescent age of 11. The symptoms of puberty were hard to ignore, and my attention became fixated on my developing body. This idea is explored in the photograph Fitting In, which discusses the suffocating desire to satisfy beauty standards. At the same time, the digital world exposed me to dangerous encounters of sexualization that were heavily influenced by my race. The accelerated maturation and amplified struggles of identity are demonstrated in the work Early Bloomer. Though all pieces address different events in my teenage years, they are connected by a bright red—whether it be present through promiscuous clothing or shades of lipstick associated with older women—that signifies the seemingly physical, yet inherently socio-emotional, impacts of socialization on one’s development.

Had it not been for my own exposure to art, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to unpack my subconscious conflicts, hindering my processes of healing and growth. It is because of photography that I can articulate the themes of racialized femininity that I struggled to verbalize in the past.