Beautiful and unsettling: Scarlett Yang critiques roles assigned to women in Chinese society

Starting with tarot-inspired artworks, illustrator Scarlett Yang has begun a journey exploring the female identity in Chinese culture and beyond

The roles women must play in society and the social pressures on them are under scrutiny in an incredibly rich and multi-layered creative project by the London-based book illustrator Scarlett Yang. It begins with her award-winning illustration entitled The New Goddess (above), and has continued in a set of tarot-like cards that explore seven dimensions of women’s experiences in China – wisdom, beauty, love, career, family, fertility and sexuality.

“I wanted to look at how Chinese women are encouraged, sometimes pressured, to keep improving themselves under the banner of perfection, navigating the tensions between traditional patriarchy and evolving feminist ideas. This duality became the foundation of the project,” explains Scarlett.

Today, as in the past, many Chinese women seek comfort in spiritual activities like astrology and tarot card reading. This gave Scarlett the idea of creating what she calls a ‘cyber temple’. At its pinnacle is The New Goddess – a creation who embodies both women’s desires and the expectations society places upon them.

“Yet this sense of comfort is ultimately deceptive: it feels beautiful on the surface but leads to a greater emptiness, mirroring the unease of reading between the lines of a tarot card,” says Scarlett.

She’s given the card series the title Goddess’s Revelation, and like The New Goddess illustration itself, at first glance, the imagery is alluring. However, there are hidden messages to be discovered within each artwork that could be unsettling or even painful to some viewers.

The card designs incorporate Chinese knots along with a variety of symbols from Chinese culture, while the imagery itself reinterprets traditional idioms, deconstructing how they reflect on women’s roles in society, for example, expectations around childbirth.

Scarlet explains: “One of the cards, Sacrifice, reinterprets the image of the Chinese mother through Confucian ideals: deified as a cultural hero yet confined to a subordinate role. The umbrella, shaped like a breast and filled with bitter food transforming into sweet milk, embodies the Confucian paradox: mothers are both venerated and exploited.”

The imagery was digitally painted, mainly in Procreate. Through the project, Scarlett is bringing various tensions to the surface, which people are responding to. “I was especially touched by personal feedback from early buyers,” says Scarlett. “One shared how she and her partner used the deck at home as a way to spark deep conversations about their relationship, turning it into a tool for both play and reflection.”

The New Goddess illustration recently won Platinum at Graphis New Talent and appeared in 3×3 magazine’s illustration show. Scarlett is working with a manufacturer to print Goddess’s Revelation and other merchandise, which will be available through her online store. And, she’s now working on a series called Her Feast, which questions how women are invisibly exploited through their sexuality.

In future, she hopes to bring her artworks into gallery spaces to invite wider audiences to reflect on them.

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