Lunar Geisha. By Michelle Watt.

When Michelle Watt was four, her family left China and moved to the US where she grew up. As a young woman, Watt bar-tendered for a couple of years in New York and experienced what it means to be turned into the fetishised Asian woman. 

It happens still to this day, but you know how you’re treated as a young woman behind a bar. You’re like a baby sheep in a pack of wolves. And my Asianness kept coming up as a way in for them. Michelle Watt

Michelle Watt's reaction was to create "Lunar Geisha", surrealistic compositions, a portrait series of a Geisha, the metaphor for the hypersexualised Asian woman. In her photographs, Watt also symbolises the "good daughter" within Asian society and the object of desire within the US-American one (via). The series explores how Asian women "are thrust into playing certain roles, the ways in which they become complicit in those stereotypes and the ways in which they rebel against them" (via).

It’s not really an inspiration as much as it’s a compulsion to work it out. Deconstructing it through staging and storytelling and narrative in these symbolic ways ends up being a really healing way of dealing with those things.
Michelle Watt

“I wanted to show how, even within Asian society, women are forced to play roles in ways that they may not necessarily want to; roles that may often be silencing them. And how – in order to fit in, in order to find a sense of belonging – we betray ourselves, and we play along.”
Michelle Watt

“Am I being hired because I’m being used as a token? Is that okay? Am I going to fight that? It’s complicated. I always feel like I’m asking these questions.”
Michelle Watts

“I crave things like belonging and love. I want to feel like I’m attractive and to have that validated by men — or by anyone. And so I’ve been complicit in fulfilling these stereotypes in order to gain the favour of others. But the first step of breaking any sort of bad behaviour or habit is to recognise it. So making stories like this helps me address that.”
Michelle Watt

“It’s complicated because you want to play that part because you want to belong somewhere. But you also don’t really like that part, so you don’t really want to play the part. That’s kind of confusing. Codependency is a huge theme there.”
Michelle Watts

photographs via and via