JESSICA YEUNG PHOTOGRAPHY

     In recognizing my insecurities, I am able to work on overcoming them, and I wanted to chronicle this experience through a series of self-portraits. This work explores my relationship with my identity and sense of purpose and how it has evolved over the past year.

Coming into college, I believed that I had a very clear and structured path. However, I soon switched my major and stopped playing piano to pursue photography. With this large shift in focus, I felt excitement, but also extreme uncertainty. These feelings over the past year have made me question my purpose at this school and my goals for life after college, producing feelings of searching, confusion, and instability reflected in photos 1, 2, and 4.

     This sense of uncertainty was also compounded with long standing self-confidence issues. Growing up in a primarily white town as a Chinese American, I wanted to assimilate with white culture so I would not conform to stereotypes surrounding Chinese culture. Standards of beauty in America are also heavily skewed towards European centered features, causing me to feel insecure and have a lack of self-confidence. I play with this feeling in an almost ironic way by posing myself in the style of “glamour shots” typically used by fashion photographers. I also express this in the third photo of this series, “Illustrated Beauty,” touching on the concept of me displaying myself in a very intentional and performative way, adopting aspects of American culture to distance myself from my Chinese heritage. Ultimately, because of this insecurity, I do not easily let people into my life and am fairly guarded, portrayed in the fifth photo, “Layers.”

     Part of my goal this year is to embrace each and every part of my identity. In the second part of my series, I explore self-love, new beginnings, and embracing discovery. “The Magician,” the eighth photo, represents this as a recreation of the similarly named tarot card, a card that signifies opportunity, inspired action, new beginnings, and tapping into one’s full potential. Coming into and being proud of my Chinese heritage has been difficult and something I have really only acknowledged since coming to college. When I was younger, my mother told me that I could not wear yellow because it would bring out the yellow undertones that Asians often have (which is not completely true); I am reclaiming this color as I reclaim my identity as a Chinese American.