“When beauty and the body are treated as things to be adjusted, emotions too are being managed in a similar way,” says Tokyo-based artist and make-up artist Yuka Hirac. This detachment of expression from emotions is the central theme to her latest project in collaboration with photographer Andy Hoang, Clinical Emotion, that imagines a chilling near-future where emotion altogether is unable to be expressed.

The shoot builds on the discourse that surrounds a boom of cosmetic procedures, from extreme iterations like leg-lengthening surgeries to more minimal adjustment procedures dubbed ‘tweakments’. It also draws on a long legacy of fashion shoots that play with the concept and aesthetic of plastic surgery, most infamously Steven Meisel’s shoot for Vogue Italia with Linda Evangelista, which walks the line between satirising and glamourising it. Recently, surgery and post-op aesthetics have become popular, as procedures become ever more aspirational.

The growing popularity of cosmetic procedures is also twinned to an age of hyper-obsession with self-image and self-optimisation, often accompanied by the suffix -maxxing, a barrage of videos online are centred around ways to improve appearance to an extreme level.

It’s this fixation on optimisation that was the genesis of Clinical Emotion. In some photos the subject is bound to a medical chair, their eye lids held back with taught strings to reveal a vacant deadpan expression. It’s an intentional hollowness Hirac set out to create, “I hope viewers can sense the cold, detached atmosphere of the images,” she tells us.

This detachment is stitched throughout the series, as the model is bound in cellophane, pulled up onto stirrups, and their mouth packed with a bubble-gum pink ​​alginate. It’s hard not to imagine the turmoil a scene like that would usually create, but Hirac stresses that this isn’t intended to be a shoot devoid of emotion, “the shoot refers to emotion as something observed and judged from the outside, almost as if in a clinical or medical setting.” Essentially while the subject is no doubt experiencing emotions, the viewer perceives none of that. “That sense of distance is what creates the quiet, slightly tense atmosphere running through the shoot.”

Photography and EP Andy Hoang, lighting assistant Patricia Anne Nellasca, photo assistant Chiara, retoucher Anh Le, producer Dream Scenario, art direction and make-up Yuka Hirac, make-up assistants Beri, Ayano Imasato, stylist Ki Ukei, stylist assistant ARU, hair stylist Hirokazu Endo using ORIBE, model Elke Biesendorfer.