This project begins with desire. The desire to be seen, to be loved, to be understood. The desire for attention, intimacy, recognition, and success. The first look, Look at Me, is built around a sigil designed with an eye-like structure. Paired with sorrowful eyes, the face becomes a plea for visibility, an insatiable need to be noticed.
In the second look, Perform, the self begins to adapt, reshape, and cater to external expectations in exchange for affection and approval. It is intentionally the most feminine look within the series. The beauty is excessive, almost fragile, revealing the artificiality of performance itself. To perform is to become visible, but also to become increasingly distant from oneself.
The final look, Made, is deliberately violent. The face is no longer merely written upon; it is overtaken. The repeated sigil spreads across the skin until the individual features begin to disappear beneath it. Identity itself becomes secondary to the mark. The whole existence of a person is flattened into a single condition: Made.
In the end, what begins as a longing to be seen ends with the disappearance of the self beneath the very structures created in pursuit of recognition.
Self-Portrait by Eta Shen