Qiuyun Huang

In every story, there is a hero and a villain. In your story, you are both.

Everyone carries a shadow. In Jungian psychology, it refers to an unconscious aspect of the personality which the unconscious ego does not identify in itself. The shadow is largely negative, such as, animalistic needs, primitive instincts, sexual desires, the desire for money and power.... There are, however, positive aspects that may also remain hidden in one's shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem, anxieties, and false beliefs).

Most of us are willfully blind to its existence. Our dark side is concealed or camouflaged in a painful attempt to protect an image that fits the narrative we decide to espouse. However, a person is as free as their mind allows, and if the mind creates barriers between the reality of the person and the reality of the rest of the world, delusion and neurosis could take over.

In order to avoid being the victim of this “shadow-possession”, we must become conscious of our shadow qualities and integrate them into our conscious personality, accepting them with open arms not as abhorrent aspects of our self, but as necessary and vital parts of our being.

Among the five senses, we always think of vision and our eyes are the window to the soul. The eyes convey a lot of emotions and information. In fact, when it comes to feelings and emotions, the mouth expresses this just as well if not more. In our daily life, the mouth is a really important tool that we use to express our appeal, emotions, desires and something inside. At the same time, by observing people's mouths, they can even help us to detect deception. The mouth conveys a lot of information that is often ignored or not even observed. When the mouth is separated from the body, it becomes a strange alien, violent and potentially sexual object.

Therefore, I finally choose the mouth as the main visual element in articulating the “shadow”.

Since the ‘Shadow’ itself is about human and human nature, in this collection, I combine jewelry with the human body to explore and express the process of discovery the shadow.

I combine the eyes, the heart, the mouth, these important parts of the human body with some symbolic elements, such as spiders, vagina, cobra's eyes,,, and form a series of new strange body structures. They replaced the wearer's original body parts and were given new functions and meanings.

In Ancient Rome, the word ‘persona’ meant 'mask’. In psychology, it refers to the role of human personas in different social environments. Life is difficult. People experience daily stress with work, school, family, physical health and finances among many other things. This is unavoidable. However, we behave normally.

We force ourselves to adapt to society, disguising our real self, creating a personality as a facade, ignoring and restraining our feelings. This brutal reality means that we all have developed some form of mental illness, just to varying degrees.

When I feel upset, depressed or hopeless, there are always some negative, crazy thoughts that come up, and my whole mind is in a state between normal and abnormal. I have designed a series of masks which combined with photography visualize the negative emotional states and to arouse people’s emotional resonance.

In the design process, my negative emotions were released and alleviated, which was also a self-healing process. The human face is the real mask, and the mask is the real ego. The essence of the mask is not a disguise but an exposure.