Shōjo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era.

Shōjo Heart is a metaphor from Shōjo manga. It means people’s feelings and thoughts straight from the heart.

Currently, there are more and more Chinese students who come to the US to study. They have their own perspectives and lifestyles to this freedom culture. After years, they break down to two main groups. The first group is one I identify now people who to me act reasonably. They study hard, and they get a job for hard-working people. The second one is the group that I was in during my first two years of college when I studied for my bachelor degree. People in that group are grandstanding to each other, and they live fake lives based on their economic level. Therefore, people want more money to maintain the lives they are faking.

I want to use my texts and photography to criticize this social issue of grandstanding. Although grandstanding provides young students opportunities to assert identities inaccessible to them back home, there are significant side-effects. Also, I try to find why and how they turn out like this because they actually act differently when they are in China. I want them to keep a Shōjo Heart when they live their lives because I know how hard it is to fight against the expectation about prejudice forces people to grandstand in order to fit into the group.