Yongqi Tang
Having studied and worked between China and America, my works have been influenced by the drastically different cultural and ideological contexts of the two countries. Interested in how the interaction with the environing world would affect our existence, I question and deconstruct my roles in both private and public space by investigating the social construction of identities through the act of painting and drawing. My works examine the fluidity of our self-images and relate to the broader human experience of the ambiguousness of identity such as gender, sexuality, and nationality. The objective of my works is to reinterpret the categories into which we are born to rearticulate the discourse around them.
Using the dining experience as an entry point, my current works examine the ambiguousness to be in the liminal state between the alienation from my country of origin and the displacement at the current settlement. The works inspect how Chinese immigrants see themselves through the concepts others have of them and the groups they belong to, and perform identities under the impact of the surrounding conditions. Identity therefore becomes a duplicated phenomenon – people are both themselves and a project they make of themselves.
