Shoran Zhou

Student art

Shoran Zhou

Absent

When my voice is unheard, and my will is ignored, who am I? Where am I?

As a woman, I have been receiving people’s thoughtlessly expressed assumptions or expectations toward my future roles as being a wife or a mother. These focused expectations on my “potentials” constantly remind me how I’m not a wife, and not a mother, no matter what other roles I am currently fulfilling in my life.

Absent is a headpiece that addresses the absence of a woman’s individuality caused by the expected roles that she didn’t, and may never fulfill. I relate people’s unconsciously repeating expressions of their assumptions and expectations to the repetitive motion of beading. Each bead is hand stitched, while at a distance the finished piece looks like a mass-produced textile; the porous structure of the piece allures people to discern the blurred face and personality covered underneath.

Here

This piece is a gift for my mother. After the long run of conflicts I had with her, I now include her in my work not as the enemy, but as a woman who I understand, encourage, and support. This piece serves as a reminder of one’s presence–it occupies both palms and has a mirror covered with a bead net which allures the viewer to look at their reflection with full attention, and aims to encourage my mother to spend a minute with just herself, detaching with the roles she’s been closely tied to for many years. At this moment, she is not someone’s mother, nor someone’s wife, but only herself.

Shuoran Zhou was born in Beijing, China, 1997. She makes wearable objects using mainly glass beads to address common stereotypes toward women’s social roles and aims at advocating women’s autonomy. Shuoran’s work has been exhibited internationally in Spain, Belgium, China, United States as well as in various online exhibitions.

Shuoran’s work addresses my personal struggles and deals with common stereotypes toward women, and aims to provoke introspection and question those entrenched, stereotypical assumptions. She makes wearable and non-wearable objects with mixed materials to visualize these issues through craft and the property of the material itself, with the hope of resonating with people who have similar struggles to mine and advocating women’s autonomy.