How often are we passively instilled new sets of aesthetic principles?
(2022)
My inspiration came from a night when I was stressed out about an assignment so I kept drinking milk but I was full already. The action to keep drinking was self-contradictory: I thought drinking the milk could relieve my pressure but it only made me so full to feel even more uncomfortable and drowsier. I suddenly got the idea to explore the relationship between passive consumption and the satisfaction we could get from it. Recalling the superstition that “drinking milk whitens your skin”, I developed the story of how trendy colors would affect our behaviors, especially among young girls like me who would crazily pursue beauty. Does buying the most stylish clothes really bring me satisfaction? Do they really make me beautiful? Most of the time I would feel lost or a bit regretful for spending so much money on a piece of clothes under impulse purchase. The cruel fact is that I can never catch up with the trend, not because I am too slow but because it changes all the time.
To keep a clear transition between each color, I gave up the idea of reflected colorful light on my face but used facial painting pigment to paint my lips to indicate the subject’s adaptation to a new color. For the next color, as the subject wiped her lips after drinking, her lip color changed to the new color corresponding to the drink she was just “instilled”. Otherwise, the consequence of drinking the specific colored liquids might be ignored.
