Shanshan's Period Diaries
drawing, embroidery, interview / 2019~ongoing
Who is Shanshan? Shanshan is a common nickname for girls, which also means "to be late" in Chinese. In this project, Shanshan is my period's name.
Pre-Menstrual Syndromes (PMS), without clear definition and often linked with a wide variety of symptoms, is more of a myth than a diagnosis, according to psychologist Robyn Stein Deluca. But from my personal experiences, I’ve wanted to express and understand how my cycle affects me. Therefore, my Period Diaries started from documenting the relation between menstruation cycle and emotional pattern. With one to two drawings per week and often more drawings during my period, I get to use PMS as a cause to express and self-analyse my mental/physical condition.
Shanshan's Period Talks
I became curious about how Period Diaries, which helped me communicate with myself and presented the disconnection within me, could be used with others to recognize our disconnections with our vulnerability. At the same time, I arrived in Europe and was curious about different period cultures. Therefore, I formed Period Talks, a series of interactive interviews accompanied by my on-going art works to share what is opaque about the vulnerable body. They became a collection of stories about periods and other vulnerable experiences.
In the end I had to fly back to Taiwan due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was unable to do my project in Europe, but I was able to invite 10 Taiwanese participants to join Period Talks. We re-acknowledged period cultures in Taiwan, and the questions raised during my short stay in Europe also inspired different lens for me to look at what I was already accustomed to.
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When we talk about PMS, we’re not trying to enhance the stigma of women being emotional during their periods. When we talk about PMS in Period Talks, we reveal gender issues and the repellent of vulnerability, and how cultural factors shape our perspectives and languages when talking about periods.
"My ex-boyfriend would sense that I’d be having my period soon and offered me hot drinks. But I’m also very prudent about not using this as a ‘privilege’. I’d tell myself not to use ‘period privileges’. Later I found out guys also have emotional cycles, like my dad. It’s also influenced by hormones or something, like periods, I read it somewhere but can’t remember the details. Maybe guys just express and release their emotions in other ways and have no idea it might be related to hormones.”
— participant M.
