My work focuses on cultural dissociation, and how cultural heritage relates to and is shaped by media and technology. As someone who grew up in a New Mexican culture vastly different from my Chinese-Filipino heritage, I’m interested in the label of the “third culture kid,” and how it highlights an identity defined by fragmentation. Moreover, the intervention of Western screens and media creates a further sense of separation from a whole identity. I’m focused on how the discovery and creation of an identity seems inseparable now from technology, and how the result creates both a sense of belonging and of dissociation from stitched-together ideas of “self.”
I draw influence from techno-Orientalism and cyberfeminism to explore these topics. Both frames of thought examine the relationship between technology and identity–Techno-Orientalism through critiquing the portrayal of East Asian technology and identity within Western media, and cyberfeminism by arguing for the integration of female identity and technology. Working through these two ways of thought–one through the lens of race, the other through gender–has continued to influence the way I think about art and self. I want to argue for the agency that can come when fragments of identity don’t fit together perfectly.
Mirroring the use of multiple cultural influences, my work uses multiple mediums–painting, digital video, and sound–as a way to highlight fragmentation rather than try and piece it back together. I found that leaning into this mix of mediums was also a way for me to combine artmaking with my film and music practices, piecing together parts of my identity beyond cultural heritage. This can be seen in my project “Drop D,” which adheres painting directly to the source of sound. I like the way that things become incongruent, but also seem to take on another dimension that didn’t exist before. The mixing of mediums has become a sort of solution to the dissociation I’ve often felt when attempting to use art to explore cultural identity, giving me a sense of wholeness that I’ve struggled to find elsewhere. Formerly unanswered things become answered somewhere in between. My latest installation “Cherubim” combines music and video collage projected onto a screen-printed canvas, at the same time combining various fragments of my identity. By blending these mediums together, I hope to demonstrate how they can work together to create an idea that no individual element could achieve on its own.
Ultimately, my art seeks to challenge the notion of a singular, fixed identity and instead celebrate fragmentation and the potential for new ideas to emerge from the spaces in between.
