INTRO
For this semester’s Studio and Seminar class, we focus on the Visual aspect of the art and researches. Throughout the semester, students will do a series of Bridge projects in order to narrow down and focus more on the topic of their choice. The theme that I decided to focus on for this semester is Gender. At first, I want to explore the topic of inequalities between males and females. In order to narrow down my range of research, I decided to only focus on America and China as my research settings. After some research, I came to an understanding that the degrading of Asian man’s masculinity and personality due to the Westerners’ stereotypes were more a critical problem today. The stereotypes Westerners have towards Asian men were most likely to be, skinny, not strong enough, tender, acting too soft, or has more feminine characteristics, for example, none or lack of facial/body hair. So, as a result, I decided to revolt against the issue of “Westerners’ stereotypes of lack of masculinity within Asian men.”
PROCESS
Talking about the process of narrowing down and finding my final topic. I first started with my original idea of looking for sources about inequalities of males and females within China and America. In order to make my topic to be more specific, I then decided to just focus on America as my research setting. For the studio class, I used photoshop to create a picture collage of a professional woman surrounded by items that represent chores (referencing that she had to do all the work as a housewife).
We find objects that we could relate to our topic and recreate them with different materials to reform a deepen the meaning of the object.
I also created serval prototypes during the studio class to give a quick brainstorm of how we could present our knowledge from the seminar class in a visual way.
When I create a mind map to help me have a clear mind about what I could focus on my topic. I see the description of Asian American males were more of leaning towards a feminine way. And also my research in the Seminar class also appears to show that the harm of stereotypes of the Westerners towards Asian males was a more current and troublesome issue.
In the Seminar class, I figure out that the stereotypes of Asian men could be represented by being too feminine. And I want to fight this idea using the example of the rivet on female’s fashion products and laces on male fashion clothing.
INSPIRATION
I was also inspired by these photos from VogueChina. The poses of the model fusion with the shadow together creating very tender but strong visual appeal photos while the pose and the shadow have no direct connections. I want to create something similar for my final work.
WORK DRAFT
Some of the photos I took.
Photos after playing around with PhotoShop.
FINAL RESULT
Presenting the photos in serval diptych forms.
neutral posture VS. Huadan Peking Opera （shadow）
Tender posture VS. feminine objects (flower)/masculine objects (cowboy items)
Self protects posture VS. self-defense object (cowboy gun)
masculine posture VS. soft/ feminine colors
CONCLUSION
Consider the photos you just looked at. Do you still believe the stereotypes of Asian American males are reliable? Or should stereotypes really be taking in factor to consider the existence of an Asian man’s masculinity?
