Artist: Jennifer Ling Datchuk

Type: Sculpture

Date: 2021

Dimensions: 12 × 9 × 9 inch

Work Description: 

The title draws inspiration from the song Just Like a Woman—originally written by Bob Dylan and later reinterpreted by Nina Simone. Through subtle alterations to the lyrics, Simone reclaims narrative authority, subverts the male gaze, and asserts a voice of female autonomy.

Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s work interrogates the social, cultural, and political structures that shape women’s lives. Working across installation, sculpture, and video, she employs porcelain, ornamentation, blue-and-white motifs, reflective surfaces, as well as human hair and synthetic hair to explore themes of femininity and resistance. Her works reveal how domesticity and motherhood, while romanticized, erase girlhood innocence and confine women within controlled spaces of service. Racialized realities further exacerbate this condition, narrowing the space for agency available to Asian American women like herself.

Fragile Like a Girl takes inspiration from a display of Dutch blue-and-white porcelain at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. These decorative ceramic vessels were placed atop tall glass cabinets—out of reach, nearly invisible—yet laden with symbolic meaning.

Echoing this museological mode of display, Datchuk positions her own ceramic vessels just beyond reach. This gesture functions both as metaphor and protection, symbolizing the safeguarding of girlhood innocence as it extends through different stages of a woman’s life. She replaces traditional handles with braided and knotted hair, ranging from bright, doll-like hues to the gray-white strands of old age, marking phases of growth and maturity.

The vessels are painted with iconic female figures rendered in blue-and-white, including characters from The Powerpuff Girls—a millennial-era animated series about three young girls battling a nameless evil that transcends time, place, and culture. The artist also depicts prehistoric fertility goddesses, threading matrilineal experience across epochs to construct a shared visual language meant to be inherited and reinterpreted by future generations.