For 16 years, nobody knew what this artist looked like. Now, Princess Pea’s mask is off

Pea’s headgear initially grew out of a desire to create distance from this vapid cacophony around her. Concealing her identity allowed her thoughts to take flight, neither anchored by the past nor pulled towards the future. When Pea went on walks, her mask piqued the curiosity of children, who wanted to speak to her and take pictures with her. But the mask wasn’t for shock value alone. Her 2018 project, Proxies, at the India Art Fair raised questions of female identity and self-worth; Rituals in 2022 drew from Mughal miniatures to depict women’s inner worlds. Another time, as part of a non-profit initiative to help raise awareness about women’s healthcare, Pea asked women and schoolgirls in Delhi to write an open letter to society, then made them reflect on why most of the words they’d used boiled down to ‘shame’. After creating multiple variants of the mask, she began sharing it with women around her, including housewives, small entrepreneurs and differently-abled women from across India. The headgear concealed their true identities and allowed them to speak freely.

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