Acrylic on paper collaged in Adobe Photoshop
09/2023
I wanted to explore the intersectional positionality that is growing up as the first born daughter of an immigrant household. There is so much anxiety involved in being a woman of color while trying to fulfill expectations of success to make your parents’ efforts worthwhile. The imagery I will be drawing upon is my injured fingers from self-inflicted skin picking, resulting from intense anxiety and stress.
This piece is also inspired by the Chinese civil service exam, which my ancestors no doubt took to work for the government as one of the only ways to become wealthy. This is widely credited as the origins of “tiger parenting” among Asian parents, resulting in stress for their children for millennia.
The end result is a diptych of two squares, with a circular framed appearance in both. The first painting is the hand of an ancestor, presumably taking the civil entrance exam, cheating with a small circular answer sheet. The second hand is of a hand in the present, riddled with injuries from skin picking, resulting from the intense academic stress they are under.
