DO YOU REALLY WANT TO HURT ME

This work is created through text-based embroidery. In traditional Chinese culture, embroidery has often been framed as women’s needlework, bound to patriarchal expectations of femininity—gentleness, quietness, and dutiful conformity.

As the needle repeatedly pierces resistant cloth, the body held in a fixed posture, the back-and-forth motion of thread becomes a silent response to social norms. It may appear compliant, yet it leaves marks through friction. Each stitch is an act of insistence: repetition turns silence into something visible, voicing a self-will that refuses to yield.

Do You Really Want To Hurt Me borrows its title from Culture Club’s 1980s pop song. Re-stitched in a contemporary context, the phrase becomes a question of power: who is being hurt, and how is harm repeatedly normalized in everyday life?