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PRESSURE: Between Expectation and Self

Apr 14
6 min read

Updated: Apr 15

By Orlando Shen

Published April 2026


For many teenagers, pressure appears long before adulthood. It comes from school, from family expectations, and from the silent comparisons that exist around society. In many Eastern societies, hard work, discipline, and long-term practice are regarded as essential values from a young age. Success is often understood as something earned slowly through repetition, endurance, and control. In Chinese culture, there is even an old saying that reflects the belief that refinement comes through hardship: “The sharpness of a sword comes from grinding, and the fragrance of plum blossoms comes from the bitter cold.”


When I was asked to write the opening article for this issue, I kept returning to the same place, my own story.


I've also grown up surrounded by these expectations. Many members of my family work in the medical field, so for a long time, becoming a doctor seemed like a path that had already been planned for me. During my high school freshman year, I assumed I would follow that path as well. Gradually, however, I began to realize that what drew me in was not medicine or neuroscience, but history, archaeology, and the physical remains of the past, architecture, ruins, and cultural relics. The traces left behind by these historical sites, and the stories and lives embedded within them, captivate me far more than anything I encounter in biology class.

Today, academic achievement is often treated as the main measure of success. Many of my classmates spend every day off and holidays attending tutoring programs, preparing for the SAT, and working to improve their GPA. While they were preparing for exams in classrooms, I often found myself standing in front of historical sites across different regions of China: ancient temples in Shanxi, Buddhist grottoes in Gansu, and traditional architecture in Anhui and Yunnan. In these places, history did not feel distant; it appeared in wooden beams darkened by age, in fading pigments on stone walls, and in quiet courtyards where human presence still seemed to linger, less like something to study, and more like something still unfolding. In these places, I wrote down many stories about me and them, about my journey exploring the Silk Road.


But choosing this path didn't make the pressure disappear. If anything, it brought a different kind of uncertainty. I often questioned whether my SAT score would be enough, whether I could still enter the universities I hoped for. When everyone around me seems to be moving along a well-defined path, was I slowly stepping away from what people consider the “safe” route? Could I prove to my parents, my classmates, and even myself that I could still achieve something meaningful without following the expectations that others had set for me?

When we step back and examine this pressure within a broader cultural context, we begin to see that these values influence not only education, but also art. In many Eastern artistic traditions, discipline, patience, and long-term practice are likewise considered the essential foundation of artistic creation.


The works of the Chinese painter Leng Jun reflect this idea well.



Leng Jun is known for the extraordinary precision of his paintings. Whether rendering the texture of skin, the reflection of light, or the delicate folds of fabric, he approaches each detail with remarkable control and patience. Completing a single painting often requires an immense amount of observation and repeated refinement over a long period of time. In his artistic philosophy, perfection does not appear all at once; it is something approached gradually through discipline and repetition. In a sense, his work represents an attempt to approach infinite realism within the finite space of the canvas.


But modern Western art often takes a very different direction. Artists such as Pablo Picasso,

who are associated with the avant-garde movement, deliberately break away from traditional artistic rules. Instead of focusing on perfect


representation, Picasso experimented with fragmentation, abstraction, and new ways of seeing the world. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, human figures are broken into angular planes rather than presented as a unified whole. This early form of Cubism rejects single-point realism and reconstructs bodies through multiple perspectives at once.




Leng Jun’s work represents the search for perfection through precision and control, while many avant-garde artists search for new possibilities by breaking away from order. Neither path is necessarily better than the other. They simply reflect different cultural ways of thinking about art. One approach believes that discipline and consistent practice can bring an artist closer to an ideal form. The other believes that creativity, experimentation, and even uncertainty can produce new kinds of beauty.


When placed side by side, Leng Jun’s Portrait Series: Xiao Jiang and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon present two fundamentally different ways of approaching the human figure. In Leng Jun’s work, the image is built through careful accumulation. The skin is rendered with striking precision, capturing subtle shifts in light, texture, and tone, while every detail of the face is controlled and deliberate. The result is a surface that feels almost more real than reality itself, yet at close range, this precision begins to dissolve into patterns of texture and repetition.


In contrast, Picasso breaks the figure apart rather than refining it. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the bodies are flattened into sharp, angular planes, and the faces take on mask-like forms that resist natural proportion. Instead of presenting a single, unified perspective, the painting brings multiple viewpoints together at once, forcing the viewer to actively reconstruct the image. Yet the difference between the two is not simply one of realism versus abstraction. Leng Jun’s realism, when pushed to its extreme, begins to lose its illusion of reality, while Picasso’s abstraction does not reject reality entirely, but redefines how it can be seen. In both cases, the artwork does not simply reflect the world, but challenges the way we perceive it.

As I began to understand this difference, I also started to reflect on my own experience growing up. I was born in China and raised in what could be considered a typical Chinese family environment. At the age of nine, my family immigrated to the United States, though that same family environment remained largely unchanged. At the same time, starting a new life and growing up in a different cultural setting placed me on a different path. If I had remained in a single cultural environment, perhaps I would have followed the predetermined path more naturally. I might have pushed myself to focus on STEM, eventually pursuing a career in medicine and becoming a doctor, the person my family expected me to be. In such an environment, following the direction laid out by society is often seen as a rational and stable choice.

But growing up within two different cultural environments gradually revealed another possibility: people can pause and reconsider the life path that once seemed already decided. They can also, little by little, begin to step outside the rules of living that once appeared fixed.

Because of this experience, I began to challenge some of the paths that once felt fixed. Choosing archaeology, a subject I truly loved, may not be widely considered the safest career path, but it has helped me understand much more clearly what I want to pursue.

When we return to the original question, pressure begins to look different. Pressure doesn’t come only from exams or competitions. It also comes from how people define success. Some choose to work within existing rules and push themselves closer to perfection, much like Leng Jun refining every detail on canvas. Others choose to step outside those rules and explore new possibilities, like many avant-garde artists. Perhaps what truly matters is not the final result, but the process through which individuals move between pressure and choice, between expectation and the self, gradually discovering their own path.

And it is exactly the question that this issue hopes to raise:

Am I choosing my own path, or am I simply being pushed forward by expectations?

For many people growing between cultures, this question may feel even more real. We often exist in a space in between, influenced by traditional expectations while also encountering the possibilities offered by new environments and ideas. This condition is exactly what this issue refers to as “Liminal.”

Within this uncertain space, people may feel pressure, but they may also discover entirely new paths. And it is through this process of continual exploration that we slowly come to understand what we truly wish to pursue.

In some ways, the choice is not so different from the contrast we see in art. One path moves through discipline, refinement, and control like Leng Jun, building meaning detail by detail. The other moves through disruption, experimentation, and redefinition like Picasso, breaking form in order to see differently.

Neither path is inherently right or wrong. What matters is the act of choosing, of recognizing whether we are shaping our own direction, or simply following one that has already been drawn for us.



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