The Masks We Wear

The Masks We Wear presents a witty yet unsettling dialogue between the natural and the digital. Rendered with textured realism, the birds possess a quiet dignity. Their feathers meticulously detailed, their forms stoic against shimmering champagne metallic backgrounds that lend the works an almost reverential presence.

The intervention of emojis: heart eyes, star eyes, hidden eyes, pulls the viewer abruptly into the absurdity of digital culture. What first appears playful or humorous gradually reveals a darker subtext: the emoji masks flatten individuality, reducing living beings to shorthand symbols of desire, admiration, or detachment. This tension between the careful naturalism of the birds and the flat artificiality of the emojis mirrors a broader cultural struggle between authenticity and performance in the age of social media.

Together, the trio forms an emotional rhythm: withdrawal, infatuation, spectacle. Privacy, passion, and performance unfold within the blunt simplicity of emoji language. The metallic leaf recalls the glow of expensive metallic technology. In The Masks We Wear, I hope to capture something both ridiculous and haunting—the way contemporary life so often asks us to trade depth for symbol, substance for surface, and self for spectacle.