Avenyx® is a parafictional design project that imagines an emotional welfare system in which women are offered daily affective support under the guise of public health. Centered on a fictional capsule and framed as the Women Emotional Wellness Initiative, the work exaggerates the belief that women are naturally more empathetic in order to expose how emotional labor is socially produced, normalized, and unevenly distributed. Rather than proposing a solution, the project amplifies the quiet violence hidden inside benevolent systems of care.
Presented as a public tabling event modeled after campus wellness drives, the installation used branded packaging, free samples, posters, video, and a pharmacist-like interaction to create an atmosphere that felt polished, familiar, and safe. Before taking the sample capsule, which contained pumpkin powder and purple sweet potato powder, participants were required to sign a consent form. This procedural step deepened the project’s bureaucratic realism, lending the encounter a heightened sense of institutional legitimacy while underscoring how compliance can be folded into apparently benign systems of care. Through this soft and procedural encounter, the project invites a delayed realization: that comfort itself can be coercive, and that institutionalized softness can function as a subtle form of control.
Year
Type
Instructor
Created with
2025
individual project
Inmi Lee
adobe illustrator, adobe photoshop
Product
Performance
Participants