top of page

This project explores the characteristics of teenagers in the 2000s and illustrates social conditioning through Chinese iconography and cultural narratives. The 1990s and 2000s were very important in Chinese contemporary aesthetics, a time when people started to have more freedom to express themselves. Yet as long as there is still social conditioning, including constraints from schools and parents, such contradictions are still present in contemporary Chinese culture. These photographs are a combination of emotions and reflections of confusion amongst some Chinese teenagers. Especially under the pressure of being a good student in school and in front of parents, the inner self-identity and emotions of adolescence are placed on the edge all the time. In the process, I invited two Chinese females of the same generation as myself to be the subject of my photographs. When I took the images I told them in advance that the theme is about school rules, and, without my asking them to do so, they began to automatically use props to restrain themselves, such as finding something to cover their faces or wrapping a rope around their bodies. Leslie Zhang, a Chinese photographer born in the 1990s said, "I want to tell those familiar stories in the images I create”. Like Zhang, I too am part of the same generation and, like him, this is what I wish to do as well. To tell stories about social conditioning in contemporary China from my perspective, as a female, and through my photography.

bottom of page