Beauty, in the Eye of the Observer focuses on the phenomenon of the online gaze, inspired by a Chinese social media platform in which international students document their lifestyles in increasingly homogenised forms. 

The project centres on a series of participatory durational performances which seek to imitate the gestures adopted by Chinese social media posters based in London, and audiences are invited to stage, dress and photograph a series of replicated Instagram posts set in a green screen. These performances are documented in a film overlaid with narration comprised of the most common comments from social media followers, and a series of books cataloguing screenshots, interrogating uniform elements of social media posts, and describing the process of reproducing the homogenised photographs. 

The project aims to encourage viewers to reflect on the wider impacts of excessive self-promotion on social media. By interrogating the science and psychology of social media, it exposes the influence of online gaze and warns the public against over-reliance on social media, which threatens to make us homogenised products of the information age.