An immersive Mixed Reality journey through intergenerational memory, this project critiques the roles of women in the family under Confucian culture and examines the perpetuating mother-daughter relationship. As the player embodies the mother, they navigate domestic spaces such as the kitchen, changing room, and bedroom, unravelling cycles of sacrifice, silence, and inherited duty, ultimately reclaiming selfhood beyond imposed identities.
This project explores intergenerational inheritance and women’s identity within the Chinese sociocultural context, framed by the Confucian virtue of filial piety. Through immersive Mixed Reality storytelling, it reveals how silence, sacrifice, and obligation are transmitted across generations. The player embodies May, a woman whose sense of self has been shaped by imposed roles—dutiful daughter, considerate wife, devoted mother—until her own name and dreams fade beneath them.
The narrative unfolds across four interactive rooms, each representing a stage of inherited expectation from childhood to adulthood. In the kitchen, the rice jar symbolises guilt-tripping disguised as love, where the stereotype that housework belongs to women intertwines with son preference, turning chores into a chain of duty “for your own good.” In the changing room, mirrored reflections shift with each outfit, illustrating how social and familial judgments restrict self-expression. In the daughter’s bedroom, the player confronts her child’s drawings, discovering that the painful silencing once endured has been repeated and passed down. The final space, a return to the childhood home, becomes a moment of release: past burdens are acknowledged, but let go, offering the possibility of breaking the cycle. By integrating tactile interaction, the project constructs a space in which memory and present blur together. Rather than prescribing answers, it invites reflection on women’s agency, questioning how traditions, policies, and family structures shape identity. At its heart, the project is an act of reclamation: Before being a daughter, wife or a mother – you are, first and foremost, yourself.
Project portfolio
In-depth Interview Trailer with Mothers
