Abstract
This research-creation project explores how negotiating mixed race identity through an interdisciplinary art practice can contribute to current discourses around mixed race composite ethnicities, in the context of place and belonging, specifically Chinese and white in Hong Kong. The artworks draw on my lived experience as a mixed person where the notion of ‘them’ and ‘us’ as binary opposites breaks down in the “enduring reality of the body” (Burt 2004, 29). Having lived only in either the UK or Hong Kong, I have not seen myself reflected in the dominant historical or cultural narratives in either location. In the negotiation between the surrounding culture and self-identity, the research examines the complications of individuality that don’t align with dominant assertions of national or mono-racialised identity formation. The term negotiation is used here to indicate the possibility of a mutually beneficial dialogue between constructs of nationality, ethnicity, location and identity. The “passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 2012, 2).The autoethnographic starting point is a springboard into praxis that highlights the trajectories of shifting social and political structures that shape attitudes and assumptions towards race. History, both recorded and personal, shapes both the culture we live in and our individual identities. Over time in Hong Kong, the mixed race body has been seen as a site of transgression and stigma, in defiance of colonial racialised boundaries, as well as a site of fetishisation. By focusing on Eurasian mixed race identity formation, set within historical, contemporary and speculatively future social frameworks, this research aims to extend the discourse relating to mixed race identities and in so doing create visual artworks that provide space to engage with the complexity of the lived mixed race experience and challenge deeply embedded assumptions around racial norms. The articulation of a space for the other gives voice and presence to the individual stories that refute one-dimensional stereotypes. It seeks to keep open channels of communication and dialogue that may act to bridge the polarization and boundedness that is increasingly prevalent across many nations, not only in Hong Kong.
The research seeks to avoid demarcating the space mixed race people occupy as binary or oppositional, but rather to claim it as a space of complexity wherein shifts in the contexts of culture, history, nationalism and location are open for re-examination. It gives weight to the role of the artist as a facilitator of discussion and alternate approaches to global concerns around belonging. To achieve this, the methodology involved studio experimentation where form and materials evolved away from static representation, to artworks that engage with performativity for both artist and audience. These include lecture performance where the archive becomes a contested multivocal text; wearables where the artwork is activated by the audience wearing cloaks and moving autonomously; and almost invisible physical structures which literally catch audiences, causing unwitting participation and reaction. These processes reconfigure questions of mixed race representation to offer “open works” (Eco 1962, in Bishop 2006, 20-40) which contain a multiplicity of layered meanings that can sustain thematic and symbolic interpretation. In this way, the artworks function not as narrative illustration of experience but allow for a framework in which an audience can engage with ideas through their own active participatory experience.
As a research-creation project, this thesis is experimental in that it deploys the concept of an open work, a result of which is to turn identity issues into agency as a process, as well as to keep the hermeneutic circle open. The performative elements of my artworks, for example in the form of cloaks which conceal appearance, turn neutrality to potentiality. (Non)performing/being in wearable cloaks is an invitation to raise questions and activate audience agency, in contrast with a conventional thesis which aims to settle at new conclusions through exposition and argumentation.
The research puts forward new aesthetic forms found through creative practices which engage with history, the examination of archival material, means of worlding through artmaking that can speculatively move beyond the frameworks of restrictive binaries, and art itself as an addition to a more progressive and inclusive form of expanded archive.
| Date of Award | 6 Jun 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Linda Chiu-han Lai (Supervisor) & Bo ZHENG (Supervisor) |