Welcome to the Afternoon Tea Party — GSA Postgraduate Degree Show
Siyuan Wang | Postgraduate Degree Show 2025
Glasgow School of Art, Stow Building, 1st Floor, Space 51 | 29 Aug – 7 Sep 2025
My degree show centres on the theme Afternoon Tea, conceived as a symbolic tea party. The works draw upon fairy-tale narratives, Rococo ornamentation, and the aesthetics of delicate sweets, intertwining motifs of sugar, cakes, silk, and ribbons with narratives of female growth. Beneath the gentle and alluring surface lies a sense of discipline and suppression, exposing the complex conditions in which women are watched, consumed, and constrained by cultural and social mechanisms.
In addition, the exhibition presents earlier works such as Take A Bite and Sweet Trap, which function as preludes and interconnected chapters of Afternoon Tea. Through the imagery of melting cakes and demonic infants, or silent girls enclosed in glass candy jars, these works address desire, intimacy, sweet fantasies, and the mechanisms of female self-defence. They provide an emotional overture that lays the groundwork for the visual and conceptual narrative of the degree show.
Through painting, the exhibition invites viewers to look beyond the surface of “sweetness” and enter a space of unease and struggle, where hidden emotions and the possibility of reclaiming subjectivity can be felt. Each work is titled like a dessert or a drink, allowing the audience to experience the show as if selecting from a fantastical tea menu, gradually uncovering the narratives concealed within its delicate sweetness.
