What determines who you are? The borders you were born within, how you look, the name you carry?
The question, of course, is already too narrow. We tend to treat identity as something fixed, tied to a country, a culture, or a name. But much of what defines us resists neat categorisation; it arrives in pieces, assembled slowly over time. Dimensions of Identity: Fragments, Borders, and Transformation brings together works by Danh Vo and Tseng Kwong Chi from the M+ Collections. Adapted from an essay by Chan Sai Lok and directed by Wong Fei Pang, the film intercuts performance art, narration, and collection works to reflect on displacement and mobility, and how each shapes the way we see ourselves and others.
Danh Vo’s We The People (2011–2016) gives that idea physical form through a life-size replica of the Statue of Liberty, one that will never stand whole. Its 260 copper sections sit in different collections worldwide. Vo, born in Vietnam, fled the country by boat with his family as a young child amid the upheaval that followed the Vietnam War. We The People shadows this personal history of displacement through an irreversible scattering of its parts across the world.
Do labels we attach to ourselves fulfil projections of collective values, or do they affirm our identities?
Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographic self-portraits from his East Meets West series (1979–1989) approach the question from another angle. In each black-and-white self-portrait, Tseng stands before a landmark somewhere in the world dressed in a Mao-style Zhongshan suit, mirrored sunglasses and an identification badge, sometimes marked ‘Visitor’, sometimes ‘Slut for Art’. The costume toggles between bureaucratic formality and camp provocation—part ambassador, part perpetual outsider—while the images press at who gets to belong, and on whose terms.
Instead of fixing identity in place, the works that gather here and the performers Wong threads among them hold it open, encouraging us to look more closely and question our own certainties.
About Cross-Cuts
Cross-Cuts is a video essay series from M+ that cuts across curatorial disciplines—visual art, moving image, and design and architecture—to draw unexpected connections between works in the museum’s collections. Each episode pairs a writer from outside of M+ with a video director, weaving objects together under a shared theme.