This body of work is an insight on the teenage experience, with each work portraying a common but also uniquely personal teenage struggle. From juggling the pressure of academic excellence to struggling to find a sense of belonging among peers, the...
Process: Layers of acrylic to build up various texture in the skin
Size: 27*54 inches
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
This artwork is based on the desire to be accepted in a white-dominated society. Ashamed and desperate to hide her Asian features, the girl searches for anything to bleach her yellow skin. The artwork captures the moment with which she settles with a bottle of toothpaste and applies it to her face.
The exaggerated arrangement of hands reflects the difficultly of trying to be someone she is not but having to do so in order to recognized as equal. Moreover, the positioning of one hand rubbing the white into the skin and the other squeezing it out of the tube creates leads the viewer's eyes in a circular motion up and around the work. It is almost as if she is trapped in a cycle of application and can never break free from the system.
Her eyes do not look straight at the viewer; instead, she stares at the tip of toothpaste eagerly as if the white in the bottle had the power to change her entire future.
Yet at the end of the day, the girl concludes that toothpaste advertisements were all "dishonest" when they guaranteed, "Whiter in fifteen-days" on their packaging, not realizing that it was the toothpaste that she was applying on her face. This loss of her rationality and common sense aims to spread awareness about the dangers of discrimination upon minority groups in the United States.
