Mission
‘West. East. I. Other.’ aims to provide a space to nurture another perspective on visual culture that has yet to be fully represented in the mainstream. This online study seeks to decentralise the notion of ‘global vs local’, and to document a growing desire for self-presentation as persons who exist in between various cultural spheres.
By gathering projects such as art and publications, through to music, design and fashion, that are a part of the developing culture of East Asian actors and their ancestral European migration, their interactions embody both familiar and unfamiliar cultural values and influences occurring in wider contemporary culture.
The points of departure for this archive are always persons who reside or practice primarily outside of Asia that have shown an alternative way in accessing their parental or ethnic origins to produce a contemporary outcome. By going through the entangled background of the participants, the archive traces the many varying voices with a focus on what inherent histories and which societal constructs they have been born into. Rather than offering a definitive explanation for the cultural identity of the East Asian diaspora, the range of concepts and ideas of W.E.I.O. provides a sensitising tool for understanding the stories which will emerge in this platform.
The archive is based on the process of selection that highlights ideas, materials, themes that have contributed to the cultural identity of East Asian Diaspora. By digitising information continuously through a research process that includes interviewing, tagging and mapping, our future aim is to embrace a dynamic understanding of this project by conducting an online residency with the actors, allowing them to edit or modify the architecture and the mode of thinking of this actor-based archive.
