How much our attraction to an object or a color depends from the tastes, the influence of parents and society or is it an effect of invasive marketing and globalized capitalism? The South Korean photographer Jeong Mee Yoon asked after having noticed the spasmodic love of the five-year-old daughter for the pink and that of the son for the various shades of blue. The family of Yoon has become the starting point for Pink and Blue Project a series of images in which children of different origins are portrayed surrounded by toys, clothes, their things, revealing a huge monochromatic profusion divided between pink and blue.
In an attempt to testify how much the children and their parents are consciously or unconsciously influenced by campaigns and popular culture, the artist recounts:
"this phenomenon seems to spread in a homogeneous way between the different ethnic groups of children regardless of their cultural background. This preference is the result of cultural influence and the power of pervasive commercial advertising such as those of Barbie and Hello Kitty. Through advertising, consumers are directed to buy blue items for boys and pink for girls. Blue has become a symbol of strength and masculinity, while pink symbolizes sweetness and femininity."
The protagonists of this reportage come from New York and Seoul, children immersed in their small kingdom made of blonde Barbie and super heroes, with mini kitchens or mini cars. The same objects for each subject, the same dominant color for each genre. The abundance of toys in which they are immersed resembles that of the shelves of the supermarket: this, underlines Yoon, makes us realize once again how much advertising has become so persuasive, and how much it encourages parents to buy products in huge quantities in those respective shades that will contribute to the "creation of the gender identity of their children". By placing the smaller objects in the foreground, the photographer increases the impression of being in rooms overflowing, suffocating and oppressive for the subjects so much that it seems almost difficult to identify them at first sight.
This experiment conducted by Jeong Mee Yoon was completely reported in the photographic book The Pink and Blue Project (Ed. Nadine Barth, texts by Bill Kouwenhoven, Bonnie Yochelson, Geun-Jun Lim aka Chungwoo Lee, Young June Lee, Jeongmee Yoon, graphic design by Julia Wagner) available online for 40 euros.
