Cyberbullied

Author
WU, Xinyi (Kaya)


In this workshop, I created a work that represents a specific social problem — cyberbullying. I came up with this idea because I read so much news about the suicide of singers, actresses, and some other public figures these years. These people seem to be far from us, but actually we can be so close to them on the internet. Everyone can leave any comment under people’s blogs, Instagram and so on. Some people never take this seriously, that’s why they can just type these malicious words without any sense of shame. But sometimes it’s exactly these words that lead to these people’s decision of taking their own life.

For the artwork, I created a puppet with a smiling mask to represent the public figures. The idea is that they never show their true emotions to anyone, instead they always hide under a mask with a perfect smile to show their positive parts to the public. I haven’t focused on painting; rather instead, I made an arbitrary puppet to represent tired and overwhelmed persona. I also used many random sharp things such as umbrella ribs, broken CDs and broken knives to impale the puppet. Then I stuck some stickers with the bad words written on them at the end of these sharp things at the back of the puppet to represent the harm that the words inflict on them.