On a recent trip to China, artist Jennifer Ling Datchuk visited a shop in Shanghai that offers eyebrow tattooing. Women can choose from a variety of brow shapes posted on the wall, from thick to thin, steeply arched to more natural. Datchuk was struck by the fact that each design was named for a Disney princess: the Sleeping Beauty, the Cinderella. It was just one of countless examples of the dominance of Western beauty standards that she saw on her travels, alongside skin-lightening creams and wigs made of human hair in every color.
“I always saw in my work how identity can be manufactured,” she said. “When I was in China, I met a hair dealer.” Hair dealers travel across rural China, buying ponytails that eventually make their way to wigs in the United States and elsewhere. “Think of how these were extensions of the body, commodifications of women. Women have been sold all over the world.”
Now living in San Antonio, Datchuk grew up in New York City with a first-generation Chinese immigrant mother and a second-generation Russian and Irish immigrant father. She recalls feeling different as a child, as though “part of a third culture that exists on its own.”
