Monstrous Love

Monstrous Love is a ceramic sculpture series that reflects on the emotional control and unrealistic expectations parents often impose on their children. Inspired by my own family experience, the work explores how love within the family can become distorted, turning care into pressure and affection into control.

The central image of the series is a rabbit forced to transform into a phoenix, symbolizing the child reshaped by parental ambition. This transformation refers to traditional ideas like “hoping sons become dragons, and daughters become phoenixes,” where children are expected to fulfill the dreams of their parents rather than live as themselves.

The rabbit, a personal symbol from my childhood, appears in various mutated forms — cute yet unsettling, fragile yet constrained. Through the use of ceramics, a material associated with home and delicacy, the sculptures create a tension between surface charm and hidden pain.

The final piece, A Rabbit Is Always a Rabbit, shows a rabbit figure breaking free, its ceramic shell cracked open to reveal many smaller rabbits inside. It represents a return to one’s true self — a quiet resistance to being reshaped, and a reclaiming of identity.

This work invites the viewer to reflect on how family love can both shape and deform us, and how breaking away from imposed ideals may be the first step toward self-acceptance.