Fashioning a Sense of Self

FASHIONING A SENSE OF SELF

ISSUE 1, AUG 2019

ARTIST

Adrianna Tan SOCIAL MEDIA

IG: @atangerinee FB: /atangent WEBSITE

https://www.adriannatanphotography.com CONTACT

(952)451-9109 atan4@wellesley.edu ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Phyllis McGibbon for guiding me through this year-long project in ARTS317/ARTS318 at Wellesley College. I could not have had a better academic year because of this course. Many thanks as well to Anna Hepler and Liz Ogbou for helping me understand my own work better and make significant breakthroughs.

Thank you, Kelechi Alfred-Igbokwe and Riann Tang, for editing my “Letter from the artist� because sometimes software engineers like me struggle to write! Lastly, I would like to thank each and every participant for bringing this project to life through their style and words.

Fashioning a Sense of Self is an attempt to reclaim and explore the identities of women of color through photography. The images portray young women of color in spaces recognizant of their style and complementary to the forms created by their clothes and bodies. The project began with an all-inclusive, open invitation by which the models themselves were to decide the extent to which they would participate and how they would dress. In this way, these models of color maintained autonomy and agency over the way they are depicted.

CONTENTS 1. letter from the artist 2. the participants

LETTER FROM THE ARTIST On growing up and growing out of the colonialist lens Despite having grown up in a predominantly white suburb in Minnesota, my indoctrination into eurocentric beauty standards didn’t begin until middle school when I created my first Tumblr account, giving me access to the world of fashion and photography at an ease that I had never quite had before. This ease of access came with a price— the overwhelming exposure to visual media that I had never previously experienced. Back then, I never watched TV beyond Saturday-morning cartoons and was mostly occupied by my books and video games, so I was never entirely attuned to the void of racial representation in the media.

My incessant time spent on Tumblr also resulted in a careful curation of images that I began obsessing over, all of which were photos of white models. Every day I sat awestruck over images of women whose anatomies were nothing like mine, with brow bones and nose bridges that I found to be absolutely stunning. With time, my self-hatred quietly emerged and fed on internalized colonialist ideas of inferiority and content exclusively of white women, and in rapid succession it developed into an angsty period of body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and hopelessness.

My obsession over the “ideal” white body was inevitably prioritized in my art when I began taking photography seriously in high school.

With a desire to imitate photos that I saw on my growing array of daily sources of inspiration, which included Tumblr, Lookbook.nu, and a plethora of Scandinavian fashion bloggers, my conception of a good photo became so deeply entrenched in the aesthetics of whiteness that I also began to believe that no good portrait could be taken without them.

Towards the end of high school, I began educating myself through online sources that helped me better understand the complex system of racial oppression and social inequities. By the time I entered college, my misplaced self-hatred dissolved along with the disordered eating and body dysmorphia that accompanied it. Upon recounting those years of adolescence in middle school and high school, I

realized that the whitewashed media was a form of psychological manipulation that wormed its way into my brain and made me a victim, as well as complacent in upholding the current system of racial inequality through my internal beliefs.

It is not a new concept that the media inflicts violence upon people of color. It’s a form an insidious violence that has left an invisible scar on my own being. When I think back to the intense, visceral self-hatred I had for my own existence during my adolescence, it was, for the most part, attributed to notions of western beauty.

It was what made me grow up hating my own anatomy, my own flesh and skeleton, to the point that I couldn’t even see myself—My eyes were distorted by my aspiration for the white body.

Through college and continuing on to my postgrad life, I use my art as my voice to stay active in the conversation of racial and social equity. With regards to my project, “Fashioning a Sense of Self,” taking photos that celebrate the identities of people of color, specifically women and non-binary people, stems from my desire to push back against the greater media that normalizes racism and imposes such a sense of otherness upon people of color and every other marginalized, intersectional identity: queer, trans, non-binary, disabled, etc.

While small steps have indeed been taken in the fashion industry and the art world in the past year to introduce a greater diversity of subjects, it could justifiably be said that their true intentions lie in pandering to the current wave of sociallyconscious consumerism. The fight is far from over.

There's a marked difference between diversity and inclusion, a difference in which one is a surface-level commitment and the other is an institutional shift.

I certainly will not remain complacent, for I am hopeful for a near future in which the greater media portrays a more equitable representation of bodies.

Onwards, Adrianna Tan

I personally don’t wear anything as a political statement about anything; I simply wear what I want because I like how it looks. At the same time, I do believe that in some ways, current social issues and the fashion industry seem to be clashing, and I’m interested to see how much further they’re able to commodify “poor” aesthetics andcapitalize on movements that are “pro-body” when in reality they still cater to a certain form of beauty standard.

I follow gaysian and Asian gender non-conforming style bloggers/ influencers on Instagram, and I am so glad to have that exposure and them as inspiration. Queer Asian Americans don’t get a lot of representation otherwise in terms of fashion/ greater media, so I’m glad to have found artists and influencers on Instagram. They include: @oh_anthonio, @thestreetsensei, @ajol_llama, @chellaman, @ alokvmenon.

By taking this magazine with me, I am participating in the dissemination of media inclusive to the very people the greater media seeks to exclude.