MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Yuqing Sun

Works

Maternal Cycle
This project takes the social mechanisms of “Intensive Motherhood” as its starting point, exploring the process by which women are pre-shaped into “potential mothers” by culture and the consumer system even before they become mothers.
The orchid serves as both a symbol of society’s projection of motherhood and an invasive occupation and constraint on the body; the body of the young woman, meanwhile, is shrouded, isolated, and surrounded, reflecting the tense relationship between the individual and external norms. This visual strategy deepens through the painting’s three-stage evolution–from sweet irony to spatial and physical oppression, and finally to the symbolic occupation of the body-gradually revealing the cyclical and intergenerational transmission of maternal experience on emotional and physical levels. By placing the “cute” aesthetic within a critical context, the work reveals how this visual language unconsciously internalizes societal expectations, shapes female identity, and perpetuates structural disciplinary logic beneath its gentle façade.


