Yijin Qi

This project begins with the tulip—a plant that appears “genderless”—and focuses on the “femininity” expressed through its imagery. It analyses the shared visual construction patterns between tulips and women, revealing the patriarchal viewing logic hidden beneath, in order to explore the mythical nature of “femininity” and how it has been defined and shaped by patriarchy. Framed in this way, the outcome of the project takes the form of a book, which attempts to break away from the linear narrative structure commonly found in other media. By collecting images and typologising them—then juxtaposing, superimposing, rotating, pairing, and twisting them—the book reconstructs a visual framework of femininity supported by recurring “visual mechanisms”. Addressed to young women, the book hopes to lift, however slightly, the veil cast by patriarchal myths and to contribute as a modest act of empowerment within the continuing struggle for women’s liberation. The starting point is personal: a traditional family willing to invest in a daughter’s education while still insisting that, since she will eventually marry, there is little need to study too much. Set against a broader social backdrop, a powerful refrain echoes—rather than striving alone, it is easier, and more “natural,” to rely on a good man. Such “advice” embeds values that, over time, mould the expected traits of femininity: delicacy, beauty, fragility, passivity, dependency. Situated within contemporary visual culture, the inquiry engages historical images and present-day media to show how these mechanisms persist and adapt.

To ground this inquiry visually, the project extends from the designer’s interest in plants. Focusing on ostensibly genderless species clarifies the constructed nature of femininity as projected onto them. Tulips were chosen because they are widely loved for refined forms and a shy, delicate temperament; yet tracing the flower’s shift from wild species to cultivated ornament shows that the celebrated cup-shaped bloom is less a product of nature than of long-term human intervention and selective breeding. In parallel, tulip imagery has often been embellished with decorative exaggerations that further stabilise an impression of lightness and fragility.

Methodologically, the project offers a semiotic analysis and application that centres on shared, visually coded mechanisms appearing across tulip and female imagery. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s analysis of gender in advertising, it categorises and organises similar visual signs; informed by Roland Barthes’s account of capitalist mythologies, it separates the signified of femininity (the ideal traits associated with women) from its signifiers (the visual forms that carry them), and traces how those codes are ideologically redirected to serve patriarchal control.

The book then seeks to invert that purpose: rendering the signifiers as defamiliarised forms that fracture the false sense of naturalness created through repetition and longevity, making their constructed character legible. Looking ahead, the project will be disseminated in feminist and semiotic research contexts, offering additional theoretical support to feminist movements while expanding possibilities for semiotic inquiry; future iterations will broaden its corpus and contexts to build a more comprehensive body of work.