Picture Series

I don’t think I really have a decisive, formative moment. I think my visual career has always been full of self-questioning, and I have to keep improving myself with reading, learning and practising to continue to be a photographer. In other words, my career is full of formative moments. But in terms of the methodologies of making works and studying photography itself, I think I benefit a lot from my study at the Photography and Urban Cultures programme at Goldsmiths College. That experience is a starting point for me.

I had the visual idea of asking cosmetic surgeons to make diagnoses on my self-portrait before I began the project. I’ve been unconfident in my appearance since very young. I sort of know the social mechanism behind that insecurity, but that mechanism has become so internalised that I can’t simply detach myself from self-body shaming. I think the same struggle applies to millions of people who seek cosmetic surgeries. To have my portrait being drawn upon by people with power in appearance is at first like an experiment to see how same or different one’s face is judged, and eventually a visual therapy for myself.

I think the visual journalism of the present is witnessing more untraditional, conceptual expressions. I really appreciate the freedom and accuracy in terms of many talented photographers using all kinds of visual languages to tell relevant stories and express their own ideas, which help their works become more accessible. As for visual journalism of the future, I look forward to more innovative visual practice that could break away from the visual “norms” constructed by the media and photographers today, and continue to resonate with people in an increasingly divided world.

There’s internalized pressure to become beautiful in a socially recognized way – the face is considered to be the image of the self, and I think doing cosmetic surgery is like making oneself a social mask, a way to “fix” one’s identity. There’s also practical pressures, for example I read in the news that a woman who signed a contract with an Internet celebrity company was required to do cosmetic surgeries before she could actually appear in front of the camera. What surprised me is that the woman just accepted the terms like that. Traditionally Chinese people believe that every hair and bit of skin is received from our parents, and one must not injure or wound the body, but now people would undergo cosmetic surgeries not only to reconstruct themselves, but also out of economic reasons.

I think it changed unconsciously. Like a lot of people who would go through cosmetic surgery, I used to look into the mirror focusing on the “deficiencies” of my face. At a point I realized that I’m not that obsessed any more. It doesn’t mean the project is some magic surgical knife that makes me confident about my look all of a sudden. It’s only that I know these “deficiencies” are stubbornly coded by our society and internalised into my own perceptions – it’s like extracting my social self out of my body. In this sense my intention to use the project as a therapy or experiment worked.

My work shows mainly Chinese beauty ideals, or Asian beauty ideals. For example, Chinese cosmetic surgeons like to suggest double eyelid (and they specifically standardized the eyelid width: 4-6mm is natural style, 8-10mm is “European style”) and whitening injection (I read in a book that people prefer white skin because in traditional agricultural society white skin meant that you are wealthy and that you don’t have to work in the sun). There are also influences from South Korea’s beauty standards, not only because of the introduction of South Korean pop culture but also because many cosmetic surgeons in China are drawing experience from South Korea. There are also economic reasons, like the Internet celebrity fever in China.

I think so. I think they strengthen social stereotypes regarding what “beautiful” is. Especially since technology has become so advanced that people can apply beauty filters during live broadcasting – gradually it becomes unacceptable to show one’s face without the filters. In this way cosmetic surgery is like adding a real-life filter to one’s face. I think it’s an example of how people are affected by their visual representation.

I think a special moment was when I felt like I had divided myself into two by using my own face to do the project: one is a desperate cosmetic surgery patient who tries to look for a cure, the other observes from the outside like it’s someone else’s issue.

I began working on the project in 2018 and I have just ended the shooting process. My next plan is to make a photobook from the project. I designed and made a dummy by myself, but it sort of got stuck at this stage – I’m trying to look for opportunities to cooperate with book designers or publishers.