Misread Misread

I began Misread with a contradiction I had encountered repeatedly: a woman may be admired for how she looks, yet the same appearance can be used to doubt her intelligence, seriousness or ability. In Chinese, the stereotype of the “flower vase” names this reduction explicitly — a beautiful woman is treated as an ornament, present to decorate a space rather than contribute to it. Similar assumptions appear in Western workplaces and media through beauty bias, sexualised visibility and the idea that femininity undermines authority. The work does not reject beauty; it asks why beauty is so often allowed to become an argument against the person who possesses it.

To translate this idea into images, I used a transparent water tank as an enlarged container for display. A vase holds water and flowers so that they can be arranged and looked at. In these photographs, the tank holds water, flowers and the woman’s body within the same frame. She is not the vase; the container makes visible the logic that treats her as one. By enlarging the vessel until it can be entered, the stereotype becomes physical: she can be seen clearly from the outside, but the glass still separates her from the viewer.

Water makes the body appear luminous and weightless while also restricting movement, breath and voice. Refraction shifts the face and gestures, showing that visibility is not the same as understanding. Flowers, make-up and dress remain deliberately present because the project does not ask a woman to abandon femininity in order to prove her competence. They belong to her self-presentation and pleasure. The contradiction is that the same qualities praised as beautiful can later be used to dismiss the person who embodies them.

As the sequence develops, the container moves between vase, display case and barrier. Attention shifts from the woman inside it to the system of looking around her. Misread asks whether it is the subject who has been misread, or the assumptions through which she is viewed. It refuses the idea that credibility must be purchased by becoming less feminine, less beautiful or less visible.