My final project is titled “pick me” which aims to reflect on women’s self-objectification and the obsession with selfie and westernized beauty standard in daily life and pop culture. I took a selfie photo and photoshopped it with two most popular apps in China as well as adobe photoshop. The girl in the photo doesn’t look like me at all, and she looks too perfect and even fake in some way. I chose to use the circular and square frames because the circle represents a lens that focuses on women’s faces and it also suggests the avatar of our social media profiles. Besides, the scale also tries to reproduce the posters that are used to promote idol groups in Asian culture. Idols always have great impact on girls, especially on their pursuit for ideal beauty and body. As a result, some people are crazy about the beauty standard and they are willing to do plastic surgery which makes them look anonymous. Although those images are edited based on the same person’s face, they are perceived differently for people of different cultural background, since some people from China would consider them to be different person. And it is my intention to include two identical images during the critique because I also have trouble recognizing the members in some Asian idol groups sometimes. Those idols are trained by agency or entertainment companies under certain system which also reflects a kind of collectivism.
