From 2020 to 2022, while returning from my college and temporarily staying in my hometown Harbin during the pandemic, I witnessed and experienced things in a dance studio so abstract and far beyond what I had known or could imagine that I found it very difficult to describe and analyze them at that time, such as some extremely talented people who once inspired me to start dancing neglecting their own talents in an unconscious way, showing a drastic change under invisible emotional control. Some of them even went insane. I kept wondering how that teacher I once decided to trust had managed to distort people’s perception of themselves and others, especially those who were still very young with a sense of self that had not yet fully developed and thus easier to be controlled. However, things started to become clearer as I encountered the concept of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and its psychological manipulation tactics.
Psychological manipulation can occur in all types of social relationships and often takes insidious forms—including tactics such as setting up traps, twisting the reality, spreading rumors, and instigating false conflict—driven by a desire to destroy or undermine people or things they perceive as threats. The manipulators often act as victims to gain sympathy and control.
In 2024, still deeply trapped in that memory, I decided to visualize the experience into a photography project. Flowers were used to illustrate the experience of psychological manipulation through methods such as control and suppression. Unlike animals, most flowers cannot move to escape danger, symbolizing the plight of victims who are trapped and unable to break free. This immobility reflects the passive state of individuals subjected to psychological manipulation, transforming the symbolic aesthetic qualities of flowers into a metaphor for internalized repression. Through this project, I hope to raise others’ awareness of the subtle yet damaging nature of psychological manipulation so they may recognize its signs early to avoid potential harm.
