Nicholas Mirzoeff once said, “It is not a part of our everyday life, it is the everyday life.” The digital age has no hesitation in understanding this phrase, people are more willing to share their daily lives through images, and the hashtag #nocaptionneeded, the memes, vlogs, all continue to verify this phrase. Instagram and Twitter present more of an aesthetic sense and hedonism of the visual culture. Does the meaning of the image stop there? When everyone is the petite bourgeoisie of the image world, I long to step outside of the Truman show and touch the multiple boundaries of this world.

Visualization means intuitiveness, clearness, persuasiveness and creativity in my four years of professional advertising studies and practice. With regard to Culture in Visual Culture, in the History of Chinese and Western Advertising course, when I was collecting newspaper print ads during the time of the Republic of China, I was attracted by the exquisite hand-drawn style of advertising images from the beginning. I realized that a model's posture and dress, copywriting, and product style were all closely related to the social policies and culture of the time. I learned that exploring the social culture of a particular period through print advertising was one of the paths of social history research. Therefore, I understood why the pre-creation of a commercial print ad also required social background and cultural research.

I was, thus, inspired to reflect on practice. I chose VEET, a hair removal cream brand, for an ad planning competition. Most of hair removal products are advertised the same way, both in the East and the West, yet the popularity of hair removal is different in two cultures. I started to explore the reasons from a graphic hair removal cream ad that appeared on Harper’s Bazaar about 100 years ago and found that most of the ads unfolded in the male gaze perspective, promoting the product through a variety of advertising slogans that made women wary and alarmed about their appearance. Just as other visual products, such as the female figure in movies and oil paintings, exist more or less in the male gaze, this “sacrifice” has become a common habit in the evolution of society over time. Because of the influence of traditional culture, Chinese women don’t have a habit of hair removal or even avoid the topic. Even with the prevalence of westernized view of consumption, Chinese women have become more conscious about hair removal, they still avoid the topic. I captured the point of “avoidance”, which might not be the real avoidance, but a way to be decent and beautiful without telling others, a kind of “modesty”, to locate the target market and designed my final work, which won the national second prize. This experience made me aware of the close connection between visual culture and society, and the different interpretations of the same visual elements under different ideologies. I aspire to study the relationship between the visual culture and contemporary society from a diverse and critical perspective.

This is one of the reasons why I choose London to study. The cultural cognitive and historical dimensions gained from studying the visual arts are extremely limited if they are indulged in a limited social context, as Doris Lessing expressed in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. It is like searching for the missing pieces of a historical puzzle, going to another country, exploring one's own culture from the perspective of others, and looking for pieces of a jigsaw that may have been missing in a foreign land.

The programme, with its rich and informative theoretical curriculum, combined with contemporary issues lectures and workshops, also intrigued me. In the [University Name] Talks series, Professor Gerda Wielander's lecture exploring Chinese culture and politics from wall graffiti inspired me to participate in the society around me with interdisciplinary perspective because such a topic was usually studied in terms of the image of the city in China. Representing World Cultures module provides case studies in museums and galleries, and, as Foucault elaborated museum in western culture as “heterotopia”, this is what I am looking for in the study of cultures from the perspective of the “Other”. I aspire to engage in a dialogue with Western culture as an “Other”, with more participatory observation, less calm gaze.

After graduation, I hope to be a cultural and creative industry practitioner with critical thinking and practical ability. To serve museums or art institutions, to share diverse research perspectives to more people, design creative products that combines social culture and history. Édouard Glissant wrote: “Because, in the end, the idea ‘of an art institution’ today is to bring the world into contact with the world, to bring some of the world’s places into contact with other of the world’s places.” I hope people can hear the whispers from the visualized world and find their own missing jigsaw pieces.