What Kills Us This Week!

HK has the sweetest pack of ACE little girl artists and, man, do they rock!  Carrie Chau you already know since I've been a fan for the longest time. Now I'm also loving b.wing and her sad little bunny-girl.

b.wing's HUGE here. Everyone adores her work and books of her paintings - well, not so much 'paintings' as pen-and-ink-with-wash - are always best sellers.  Lost Little Bunny Girl's fast becoming what Hello Kitty is to little Japanese girls ...

... and please note that Lost Little Bunny Girl too does not have a mouth. It's long worried me that Hello Kitty doesn't, but I think that's precisely what makes her so iconic for little Japanese girls: they are silenced and they know it!

And now this new iconic HK image doesn't have one either.

Critics rave about b.wing and say her enormous popularity among young HK girls is because she precisely captures "their zeitgeist" and, yeah, I can see it.

Hell, I would not be a HK teenager for quids!  Either boy or girl!  But GIRL in particular. Boys can always bunk off to join the triads and get tattoos and great haircuts.  Girls?  Nope, nothing! It's the relentless study, study, study, alone in a high-rise apartment, with parents working 17 hour days to pay for the future she MUST make for them all.

And then there's that entire Sylvia Plath thing she goes on about in The Bell Jar:  that not only do girls have to be successful and clever, they must also be slim and pretty, fashionable and, dammit, outstandingly popular!


The pressure!  The pressure!

You know, don't you, that we're currently in the midst of HK's Annual Suicide Season.  It lasts about six to eight weeks - from the study fortnight for the end of year exams, through the exam period, the waiting-for-results period, and the final flourish after the results come out.

And you know too, don't you?, that the HK Government's masterful response to this annual spate of teenage suicides is to put bungy-jumping rescue teams on all the clifftops, and to issue schools with tents (to cover the bodies so as not to upset the other kiddies) and a useful stack of body-bags.

The horror! The horror!

Lost Little Bunny Girl suddenly makes a lot of sense, doesn't she.

And I'll tell you something else very odd about Lost Little Bunny Girl?  Whenever I've sent links to b.wing images to little girls in other places around the world, they too become instant fans.

And to think that the decades I spent in the Feminist Movement, fighting for the cause, and it's now all come down to this:

THREATDOWN