Yaohan Chen is a motion graphic designer/artist and waacking dancer based in Fujian, China and London, UK. As a female designer living in Generation Z, Yaohan hopes to explore the identities of women and sexual minorities in our society through graphic language, body language and sound, and to raise awareness of the issues of gender equality in these groups.
Yaohan Chen
In my hometown of Fujian, China, many middle-aged and elderly women suffer from the mental illness of “psychosomatic disorder". They have spent the first half of their lives being forced by men to 'domesticate' themselves again and again, trained to become the 'good girls' and 'good wives' expected by the 'whole family' to contribute selflessly to the 'continuity of life' and the 'prosperity of the family', at the cost of stripping themselves of their character, their hobbies, their passions - and of their own. But where did their souls - their true selves - go, perhaps remembered only by the objects? and photographs they used to use? The project's aim is to call public attention to the awareness of mental health issues of middle-aged and elderly women in Fujian, whose complex mental states I am trying to express through virtual theatre.
Video –
I have, with permission, collected many objects from childhood to pre-marriage and some items used by middle-aged and elderly women in Fujian. I intend to deconstruct these objects and reconstruct them into a huge theatre that is fluid, a fluid representation of the 'self' of middle-aged and older women struggling in this cultural environment. This form of deconstruction comes from feminist social constructionism, which states that "an understanding of the female self must first enter the world of self-repr
