[By James Yeung (he/him) @thisisjyyeung]
This image is a collage/self-portrait image titled ‘Questions without answers’, which is a part of a bigger personal project. This image itself is about my self-doubts and self-identity issues. I am now 21 years old and I think many people at my age including me are facing a lot of self-questioning in their lives. What am I good at? Why do I exist? What should I do in the future? What should I do to make myself happy? Especially now when we are in an age with excessive information, a scroll from social media can give people stress and the feeling of not being good enough as our minds try to compare ourselves to others, both consciously and subconsciously.
That’s pretty much the concept behind this image. I wanted to create a chaotic room with a lot of distractions. These distractions were the origins to my self-doubts, impostor syndromes and eventually, nervous breakdowns in the middle of the night. In this image, I am trying to replicate what really happened back then when I was having my mental breakdowns in my room.
In terms of the aesthetics, it was heavily influenced by the 1950s (atomic age) home decor, art, photography, etc. I adore this era a lot because I think even though people back then were living lives 100x rougher than us, they were still very optimistic about their future. It was something I learned when I was appreciating the era and also creating this project. I hope people (me included) nowadays could become more optimistic like them.
