A Taiwanese designer has turned a tough moment into a creative art project that has caught attention around the world. Yi-Fei Chen made a device called the Tear Gun that collects her tears, freezes them into ice bullets, and shoots them back at the people who upset her.
The idea came from a hard situation during Chen’s time at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. During a school presentation, a teacher asked her to finish more work in a very short time. When a classmate stood up for her against the teacher’s harsh words, Chen became very emotional. She said that she “was too emotional to control myself, I could not hold my tears so I cried.”
According to News18, Chen grew up in Taiwan, where she was taught that arguing with teachers was rude and disrespectful. This made it hard for her to speak up when she disagreed with people in charge. “I had a confrontation with my teacher, but I didn’t really agree with him. I felt like I couldn’t speak up. I was frustrated and angry. Then the tears came,” Chen said. Instead of seeing this as a weakness, she started thinking about how she could change things if it happened again. This is how the tear gun idea was born.
How the device works
The Tear Gun works in three steps. First, the person wears a mask with a silicon cup that catches tears as they fall. The tears are then put into a bottle where they get frozen using dry ice or carbon dioxide kept in a high-pressure container. The freezing takes about 20 seconds. After that, the frozen tears are put into a brass gun that uses a spring system to shoot the ice bullets.
Taiwanese designer Yi-Fei Chen showing off her ‘Tear Gun’ that collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who made her cry pic.twitter.com/bAHzEnFzxf
— ཐི♡ཋྀ (@gobIinarchive) November 29, 2024
Chen worked on this project for three months as her final school project in 2016. She had to show the idea to the same teacher she argued with. He actually liked it. “He was quite happy with the result even though it was something created against him,” Chen said.
The project was first shown at Dutch Design Week in 2016. Chen even got the chance to point and shoot the tear gun at Jan Boelen, who was the head of the department. She did it. Chen talked about how her struggles came from growing up with strict rules about respecting people in charge. She was taught that questioning teachers was wrong. This made it really hard for her to speak her mind when she moved to the Netherlands for her studies.
Since then, the Tear Gun has gotten a lot of attention on social media and has been written about in many design magazines. Chen keeps working on the device and makes other projects that mean something personal to her. She often looks at topics like holding in emotions and what it means to come from her culture. Her work has caught people’s interest on the internet because it turns personal feelings into something creative and powerful.
