Thesis Project #1: Close Encounter

I grew up in Hanoi. Attending a public school in Vietnam, where merit-based education coerces kids to be at the top of their classes to get into good schools, I constantly told myself I was not good enough. With the yearly examinations and competitions that would decide which class I get to take, and which school I get to go to, I faced difficulties in forming meaningful connections with my friends, all of which I considered my competitors, and felt pressured to make my parents proud. Therefore, for this first project, I started off by thinking about how I could portray this feeling of self-pressure. Ultimately, my pressure was not simply a product of my friends, my parents, my classmates, or my school, it was a product of my own pressure to survive in the standards that I put for myself growing up in this environment. Collaging two of my own figures, binding their eyes together, and photographing their encounter within an isolated, personal space, I present the continual cycle of self-criticism and self-supervision - the void that I had put myself in throughout my childhood.

Materials:

- Iphone

- Procreate

Process Pictures: