Like a Shōjo
2023
Candy wrappers, human hair, fabric, yarn, trimming, eyelets and fibre fill
50cm x 100cm x 52cm
Growing up in China, White Rabbit Milk Candy always evoked sweet, innocent girlhood for me. As an adult now, I still find comfort in the soft seduction of kawaii culture, but I am also painfully aware of the ways it wraps up desire, however perverse, into perfectly innocuous products. Young women are perceived as simultaneously cute and submissive, abject and threatening, and such conflicting misogynistic views are deeply embedded in the clothing we wear. Part of a series of wearable sculptures, this piece examines the feminisation and fetishisation of domestic labour, all the while trying to practice a kind of saccharine feminism.


