YingYing Li
→ I embody the trees 2024
→ If the rope could speak 2023
→ 部屋 （Bedrooms）
→ Fruits, Forest, Fertility 2022
→ 👱 📲 🦋 💕 👧 2021
→ Life is great and I'm a calendar girl! 2021
→ Film Photography
→ I embody the trees 2024
→ If the rope could speak 2023
→ 部屋 （Bedrooms）
→ Fruits, Forest, Fertility 2022
→ 👱 📲 🦋 💕 👧 2021
→ Life is great and I'm a calendar girl! 2021
→ Film Photography
The ‘Hot Girls Wall Calendar’ was something that was once quite popular in China around the 1980s - 1990s. Brands and merchants will take sexy photos of female models which have no relevance to whatever they are selling and make the photos into wall calendars, with their company names printed on them. The calendars are sold or for giving away as promotional gifts to their clients before every new year.
The women in these calendars are often young and beautiful, they are always posing by the poolside or smiling while leaning on the hood of a sports car and they never seem to have a care of the real world. They are the images of the ‘perfect women’ in these merchants’ eyes (who are often male). These young women are turned into wall calendars and become a giveaway as promotion products, and through which, they became a ‘sex object’ under the male gaze.
In this work, I fabricated these women’s real-life experiences to line up with the cruel and often de-realistic expectations from a male gazed society, such as a woman relaxing and enjoying herself while in the middle of childbirth, a teenage girl posing sexily on the bed where she just lost her virginity or a mother who seemed unbelievable stress-free even when she has to struggle between her career and her family. And by printing out actual calendars with these photos, I wanted to use an ironic device to present such an absurd social reality, in which a woman is gazed at, functionalised and dehumanised from the moment that she is born, and how she is expected to become the ‘proper woman’ throughout her life.
Inspired by this, I decided to make a calendar about the life of a real Chinese woman. I was born and raised in mainland China and have spent most of my life here before adulthood. I have witnessed and experienced society’s prejudice upon women and their inherent shackles of the female identity under the Chinese social environment. In this work, I chose several major moments and events that the majority of Chinese women might go through in their lives: their birth, menarche, the first night (to lose their virginity), marriage, childbirth, family, and death. All these moments come with complex emotions, some of them might even cause enormous change and pain to women physically and mentally, however, in a patriarchal society, women in these situations are often gazed at with prejudiced perspectives that are divorced from their reality. Only the women who meet such expectations are the ‘proper women’. Only the women who meet such expectations are what the majority of society considered ‘proper women’. So I chose the ironic title Life is great and I am a calendar girl! to convey the absurdity of society's unrealistic expectations of women.