For my final research paper, I chose the topic “Mannequins in the Art World” to dig into. I was interested in this specific topic because of  the third bridge project of this semester, which is called “Masquerade”, I collaged some elements of Salvador Dali’s paintings with Vivian Westwood’s design. That particular project really inspired me to start to observe how Surrealist artists use mundane objects in their artworks. I always knew symbolism is a huge part of Surrealism, but never did any specific research. And also we have been talking about so many different topics in fashion, especially when we discussed body in the fashion industry in Seminar class, I realized how mannequins as the representation of the perfect body shape of the time when it is produced can have tremendous power to comment on a lot of social problems. So I decided to combine two topics–Surrealism and Mannequins, together in this research project, and see how different surrealists artists used mannequins to express their perspectives of beauty and gender.

I started off by looking into the use of mannequins in the paintings of my favorite surrealist artists– Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali. I soon discovered that Giorgio de Chirico was very famous for creating characters that confuses the audience of whether they are inanimate or alive. From there, I also that many other photographers used mannequins as very important part of their work too. I specially researched about Dora Maar, Hans Beller and Man Ray, the three of them all have very distinct art style and interpretation of mannequins. Lastly, I discovered that the famous artist Cindy Sherman used mannequins just for a lot of experimental photographs that challenged the conventional idea of gender. After generating all the sources, I wrote on my paper that “In fact, there are many ordinary objects, other than mannequins, in our life being used repeatedly in surreal arts. Even when we understand that they are inanimate objects, they have tremendous power to attract or repel us as audiences when they are manipulated or empowered by different artists. But what’s so special about mannequins is that, audiences can easily project their own thoughts and experiences to this emotionless, however, alike human being in many ways object. The beauty of mannequins is within its emptiness. And this is why it is a perfect media for artists to build the relationship between reality and their their surreal art world”.

This research project was the first one I did that included so many different artists, and one of the biggest challenges throughout this entire process was to filter out the source that fits my paper the best from a very large amount of information. But I definitely think that it has been a very inspiring research project that I learned a lot from. And after having a much broader idea of how different artists interpret mannequins and use the power of it to make social statements, I understood this media and will be able to use it for my own work in the future.