Canon

These works complete a cycle devoted to the perception of one’s own appearance and to ideas of beauty. The female figure is rooted in the artist’s personal experience: when she was young, a friend once asked why she always wore her hair short and never wanted to grow it long. After that, she began growing it, and with time more and more experiences seemed to reinforce an internalized belief that long hair was beautiful, feminine, and somehow “right.” In the work, hair becomes both a source of value and a burden. It adorns the woman, gives her strength, and protects her, yet at the same time demands constant discipline, care, and preservation. Gradually, it becomes difficult to separate the personal desire to possess this kind of beauty from external expectations of what a woman should look like. The work asks where the boundary lies between one’s own perception of the self and an image shaped by culture and by the gaze of others. In the paired work, this system of looking becomes circular: the man looks at the woman, while he himself becomes the object of the viewer’s gaze. His naked body is equally exposed to observation, judgment, and desire. For the artist, this becomes the concluding point of the investigation: ideas about beauty, desire, and gender roles that once seemed stable become increasingly ambiguous. The woman is no longer positioned solely as the object of the gaze, nor the man solely as its subject. Through this reversal, the works register a broader cultural shift and ask: if the ways in which we look at one another change over time, which of our ideas about femininity, masculinity, and beauty truly belong to us, and which do we continue to reproduce as inherited conventions?

Canon

2026 — canvas/oil