The Evolutionary Journey of Finding My Cultural Identity

This journey of “finding myself” started not very long ago. Up to the point of me starting University, I hadn’t really considered my life experiences in the pasta and how my culture became the way that it is today. So I set out to create a better understanding of myself through the street photographs I took. These interests and impulses were always there, it was just the matter of me looking back at them and reflecting why I was intrigued by this form of visual imagery.

Being a traveller has helped my find interesting elements in the mundane in various cultures. My Chinese self helped me look at the UK as an outsider, while my British self helped me look at Hong Kong as an outsider as well. This disjointed perspective I possess derived from my usual upbringing. The fact that I had a very western education but a tradition Chinese background meant that my culture was a blend of the two, instead being completely ‘dual cultural’. Therefore I look at my sense of estrangement as a positive strength, using it as a driving force for my work.

Now that I’ve had a chance to further refine my ideas back in Hong Kong during the pandemic, I’ve decided that the next step in furthering my practice by taking up to Mainland China. I have not had the chance to visit mainland China as an adult and now that my creative direction is much clearer to me, I realised that in order to continue this learning process I need to explore the roots of my culture even more deeply as that is where my heritage lies. Although Hong Kong has retained a lot of the Chinese culture, I believe that a large part of my culturally makeup originates from China, and that is where I must go to learn more about myself.