我们 Wo Men
我们 Wo Men is an ongoing nudity portrait photography and research project focused on Chinese females living in the so-called western continent. This project intends to show the diversity of individuals of this stereotyped group, celebrating the beauty of nudity and diversity, mocking the concept of body shame and giving us the freedom of redefining our identities ourselves.
The title ‘我们（Wo Men)’ in Mandarin, coincidently spells the same as ‘women’ in English, which means ‘we’ in English. This title comes from the book The Second Sex written by Simone de Beauvoir. In the book she wrote ‘Women – except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences – do not use ‘we’; men say ‘women’ and women adopt this word to refer to themselves, but they do not pose themselves authentically as Subjects.’ The title contains a mindset I want to encourage, that is instead of seeing ourselves as a woman, we first see ourselves as human, and instead of calling ourselves women, we call ourselves we.
Growing up, and having more and more social norms being put into my brain, I constantly realised our society endeavours to build an unbreakable binding relationship between bodies and sexuality and sees nudity as shameful. Women with big breasts, big butts, or slender waists will be tagged sexy in a nasty way. From my perspective, this is the reason why the materialisation of women exists. But what is that? Isn’t everyone born nude? So I decided to photograph our bodies, to capture the very natural, non-sexual-related bodies, to show the diversity of the stereotypical bodies, to break the conventional relation between nudity and sexuality, to question the boring beauty standard, and to celebrate feminism, nudity and individuality.
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Instagram: @tutuguo
