Tara Fallaux Puts the Ideal of Love and Its Social Implications to Question

Shot in China from a female perspective, this project delves into anxiety, and identity crises caused by the social pressures of love and marriage.

Perfect Pearl is a poetic multimedia project about chasing love and the friction between dream and hard reality, “The picture-perfect life”. The main subjects are chasing love and “the concept of love” seen from a female perspective. What we desire or what we think we should desire.

The story touches on existential solitude, the make-ability of life, fleeting online personalities; and how to emancipate and find our own identity amidst the (lonely) crowd.

Despite its cultural definitions and particularities, love is a universal desire that allowed me to identify with these Chinese women in their early twenties. My friendships resulted in a collaboration where I interweave my own poetic observations with the thoughts and feelings of my young Chinese friends. Pursuing your “perfect future dream” feels like a dangerous game. Won't you always be disappointed if you keep chasing the “perfect picture”?

How each individual shapes her life and expresses her existence is a source of lasting fascination for me. I started the project Perfect Pearl in 2018 during an Artist Residence period in China. I came in contact with female students through Xiamen University. We talked about their loneliness, desires, and doubts about relationships. Marrying or not marrying. As many girls I befriended spoke little English, we used WeChat 'translate'. WeChat is a popular messaging app in China; it's a combination of Twitter and Facebook called ‘Moments'. In the book PERFECT PEARL, I collected personal texts that I found on 'Moments' or that they sent me directly.

Words and Pictures by Tara Fallaux

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Tara Fallaux is a visual artist who studied Film and Visual Art at The Dutch Film Academy and The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in The Netherlands, and as an exchange student at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Tara has worked as commercial and editorial freelance photographer (with a documentary style). She has made several documentaries for Dutch public television and international film festivals. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.