ABOUT

Lisa & Xinyi

-Fluid cultural identity
-Turning Stereotypes About asians Into
-turned some of our personal experiences into wearable pieces
-men on the internet, who fetishized our identity, into humorous phrases around traditional designs

-Stand alone pieces?

Edward Said wrote the book Orientalism in 1978 which boosted the development of postcolonial-
ism as a significant area of critical theory. Edward Said developed the term orientalism to describe

the way the West portrays the East. Orientalism is the form of ‘knowledge’ that authorizes and
justifies the assertion of the Western power over the East. Today, Orientalism continues as it is so
ingrained into how we see other people and cultures that it goes unnoticed. Many Arabs, Muslims
and Asians embrace this controversial term to describe the unique kind of racism they experience.
Orientalism encapsulates for many how their culture, religion and ethnicity are so often reduced
to a stereotype, causing their humanity to be overlooked and culture misunderstood.

The aim of our project is to show how Orientalism is still present. When we did research on Ori-
entalism in Asian culture in this day and age the results horrified us. We came across yellowface,

The model minority myth and how Harvard Systematically raises the bar for Asians and lowers
it for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. The list goes on. We aim to depict orientalism with our own
experiences which also includes the way Asians are represented and treated around the world. We
were especially appalled by the yellowface throughout the years. Yellowface is when people use
makeup to make someone look Asian. Examples of yellowface include the portrayal of Asians in
Western media. It dates back to the earliest days of hollywood where Asian characters were played
by white actors, often using makeup to approximate East Asian facial characteristics. It exotisizes
and makes Asians invisible, and we are constantly bombarded with this in the media, even in films
and tv series we watch today.

XINYI'S