Maternal Love and Taiwanese Cultural Practices through Visual Autoethnography

This visual artwork explore digital fashion design, cultural heritage, and ethics through a multidisciplinary approach. Using autoethnography, it examines maternal love in Taiwanese culture and asks: what shared understanding exists in cultural expressions of care? Accompanied by a short film, the work integrates Taiwanese temple motifs and rituals into contemporary digital fashion, employing Clo3D and Unreal Engine. The film presents themes of care, family, and community through eight meticulously designed virtual garments inspired by Taiwanese rituals, where mothers often pray for blessings.
As a bilingual designer, entrepreneur, and educator, I express the embodied dimensions of maternal love and challenge conventional fashion narratives by integrating East Asian aesthetics with Western European traditions. The project highlights the social architecture of rituals at Wanheng Temple in Taichung, including prayer, divining blocks, and burning incense. These practices illustrate high-context East Asian cultural ethics, emphasizing interdependencies between living and non-living forces.
Through this work, I propose that fashion’s cultural narratives—articulated visually and linguistically—can reshape global perspectives. Grounded in neo-materialism and kinship theory, this research challenges Western norms, showcasing how digital fashion can preserve cultural heritage and inspire sustainable, inclusive practices within the global fashion ecosystem.