the madness

Will fashion give a different representation and empowerment to the subjects characterized by medical power? Can the viewed subject gaze back at the viewer with his or her own singularity, suspending and petrifying the viewer with beauty and singularity?

Not just anyone can go mad. A weak organism, a deranged imagination, and conflicts beyond one's capacities do not suffice to cause madness. It may well be that a rock-solid body, powerful identifications, and the indulgence of fate, as written in the stars, lead one more surely to find madness seductive.

Jacques Lacan, Écrits, 2005, p.144

This photography project does not intend to examine every disease of the moment through the male perspective of medical power; the polymorphism of mental illness has always resisted psychopathology' attempts to carve living human beings into silent samples. Thus, fashion photography as a tool will also take a very different path from Charcot's photographs of hysterics, where the mute language of photographic film has to carry the contemporary cry of anxiety and fear rather than imprisoning the body on a pillar of shame - allowing the silent photographs to be the echoes of the contemporary body's Pathos. Fashion styling is the way by which these bodies assert their sovereignty and demonstrate their singularity.

The symptoms expressed in this photography project may have a long history and share a similar mechanism with the madness of modern people, but on an individual level it draws a private landscape with a different speed and intensity, instead of the normative one. They live alone in their subjective world, where they are kings, witches, and beggars. The black and white silent atmosphere penetrating these bodies creates a great noise of the inner world, where the body is constantly invaded, yet fragile and dignified.