“In Search of the ideal beauty,
I came to Know that…
The ideal beauty is nothing more than an imaginations”

The objectification of certain female body as alluring and seductive to the male gaze has always been a trend in mass media and wildly accepted as the ideal beauty of today. This ever-going process of inculcating the ideal beauty to the audience and I, had left me in doubt of my own beliefs and ways of seeing.

Acceptance of the commodified female body as the ideal beauty might be deemed as ‘sinful’ or ‘wrongfulness towards women’ in certain beliefs or woman rights group.  I am faced with such contradiction within my world, between religious beliefs and the appreciation of ideal beauty as defined by mass media.  This contradiction co-exist in my world call Withered Paradise whereby images of women from mass media are juxtaposed together with symbol of purity, the lotus.

An imaginary paradise where sand takes form of the lotus and women bodies frozen in red and blue hues.  Painted representations of ideal beauty are stripped out of skin colour hue, will they still arouse the male gaze as remain is the cold female form?  Sand lotuses resemble pods which transcend the female bodies into this world suggesting how this ideal beauty contradicts with my religious beliefs or even fusing into a religion which many actually idolized and worships unknowingly.