Innocence ( 2025)
Graphite and Color Pencil on Paper
18 × 10in.
Every mark here violates a rule of conventional makeup. The lipstick crosses the lip line, the eyeshadow ignores the socket, the color obeys no symmetry. I kept those violations because precision is exactly what this stage lacks, and what later stages will demand. The looseness isn't a lack of skill. It's the innocence that only kids around this age have.
The woman in the drawing is perfect: symmetrical features, a controlled expression, and a corrected surface. Her stare is direct and cold, like beauty standard nowadays that concludes everything ugly when not fit into it. A passive idealized face would let the viewer evaluate it safely. A returning gaze reverses the direction of judgment, so the act of measuring becomes the experience of being measured. I wanted the mechanism of a beauty standard, comparison, built into how the drawing looks at you rather than only what it depicts.
Stare (2024)
Graphite on Paper
18 × 24 in.
Swamp of Comparison (2026)
Oil Paint on Canvas
18 × 24 in.
Beauty standards seep in to out ordinary life . Through social media and advertisement, they are repeatedly presented by carefully selected versions of attractiveness until those images begin to feel normal. Placing multiple screens around the central figure with little negative space, I expressed the tight pressure that teen girls are exposed to. Her bank eyes conveys the emptiness that comes from self-evaluation coming from comparing oneself with idealized figures on social media.
Public gaze (2024)
Oil Paint on Canvas
16 × 22 in.
I fragmented the mirror deliberately so that no reflection could resolve into a single face. Each shard holds a feature, an eye, a lip, a skin tone, drawn from a different and mutually incompatible ideal. A mirror is normally a device for evaluating one self against one standard. By fracturing it, I convert it into a display of contradictory standards that cannot coexist. The piece isolates a specific failure. Universal perfection is unreachable not because it's difficult, but because "perfect" is redefined by every viewer, which makes the target logically unstable.
Pressure ( 2024)
Graphite on Paper
18 × 24 in.
External judgment can eventually become internalized until the feeling of being observed remains even when nobody is physically present.
I placed the figure alone in a private room, then filled the space with disembodied eyes, no actual person present. That contradiction is the whole point. It isolates the moment external judgment becomes internal, when surveillance no longer requires a surveyor. The personal objects, the clothing, mirror, and belongings, tie that abstract watching to concrete daily decisions. Formally, it marks the shift from "How do I want to look?" to "How will they see me?", with the eyes standing in not for people but for the internalized model of their judgment.
Cosmetic procedures and beauty treatments have become increasingly normalized. Through the numb face of the patient getting the cosmetic surgery, I wanted to convey the prevalence of easily altering oneself through operations and treatments. The density of hands encodes the second mechanism. There is always another feature to assess, so correcting one produces dissatisfaction with the next. The stillness, not the instruments, is what the piece is actually about.
Artifact (2026)
Oil Paint on Canvas
18 × 24 in.
Components (2025)
Acrylic and Clay on Canvas
14 × 18 in.
I placed detached eyes and lips beside real cosmetics inside a pink case, staging human features as selectable products. The familiar palette and recognizable makeup register as playful on first read. The realization that the features are isolated, interchangeable, and for sale arrives second. I engineered that delay on purpose, because it mirrors how commercialized insecurity works, presenting itself as attractive before it presents itself as a need. The face, reduced to modular parts, becomes something assembled rather than possessed.
Process
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I believe there exist two identities: the unaltered self and a constructed persona created through makeup. The two halves are rendered to communicate differently to the viewer, one reading as plain, the other as more confident, dramatic, or socially legible, while remaining anatomically one person. Makeup functions here as a variable that alters output without changing the source. The piece deliberately refuses the "which is real" framing. Both are genuine, which is what makes the division analytically unstable.
Jekyll & Hyde ( 2025 )
Graphite on Paper
9 × 12in.
Me Myself and I (2024)
Graphite on Paper
11 × 13in.
I closed the series on its opening image, the same smiling face, to make the structure a loop rather than a line. Both figures of drawings have smile on their face but the cause behind is different. The first figure smiles from the absence of awareness. This one smiles in full possession of it, comparison and judgment and internalized observation included. That awareness can't be subtracted once introduced, so resolution couldn't mean a return to Innocence. It resolves instead by reclassifying appearance, retaining every prior layer as data while removing it as the sole measure of value.
