What do we mean when we speak about ‘identity’ or ‘belonging’? When we think about art in relation to these terms, they may not necessarily mean national belonging or follow inscribed systems of behaviour and beliefs. Temporality, accelerated in the post-internet condition, is more erratically stacked. We are heading ever deeper into this temporal condition through the digital realm of social media, which enables somewhat unrestricted, though unevenly distributed, freedom of speech. In these spaces, we witness the real-time production of languages and syntaxes. The ‘other’ has gained a voice but only to continuously explain, qualify, and make sense of itself. There is no such thing as an isolated conversation: we are all experiencing the interrelatedness of our cultural and ecological diversities.

Our reflections and debates are focused on crises we are facing as humans, be it unrestrained economic development and the climate emergency, structural racism and colonial legacies, forced migration and rampant urbanisation, and recently the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. We may come from vastly different backgrounds, but still we share common concerns—personal, local, regional, global—affecting us in similar ways. Often the answers lie in small things, in soft, intangible, and hidden ways.

I see national borders becoming porous and disappearing amid our collective issues. Take for example the Mekong River, which originates from the Tibetan Plateau and runs through Southwest China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam. The river flows through several countries, connecting communities and bypassing state boundaries, carrying with it the issues of environmental crisis, such as pollution and access to water. Artists from these countries touch on greener living and economic exploitation in their practices to address concerns over the loss of local culture, connection to ancestral voices, and collective identity. Interconnected spaces are created, offering fruitful sites for exploration and dialogue.

Biennales, with their adaptive format and wide-ranging themes, have the potential to become sites of communal experience in which to speak about our common concerns. Curated by Christina Lee, Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time, the second edition of the Bangkok-based video and performance art festival, explored tensions of contemporary life. Taking Bangkok as a palimpsest, participating artists attempt to define this city by dealing with ideas, figures, and stories made invisible by the homogenising force of progress. Similarly, the thirteenth Shanghai Biennale Bodies of Water, overseen by chief curator Andrés Jaque, was conceived as an eight-month collective undertaking by artists, activists, and institutions advocating for modes of planetary re-alliance based on trans-species collectivism. Artists were encouraged to think beyond humans and nations and tie discussions about the human and non-human with those of the environment. The eleventh Taipei Biennale Nature—A Museum as Ecosystem by Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda also engaged with different ecosystemic models, focusing on the significance of reciprocal dependency and how this form of functioning tends towards a holistic common good.

In all of these cases, artists and art practitioners reflect on society, taking alternative points of view on common issues as our current, posthuman, moment rapidly engulfs our sociopolitical life. These perspectives look beyond human constructs to consider non-human forces—plants, animals, objects, and other materials—shaping our world. Through the process of care, life emerges with creative intensity in spite of cultural destruction and ecological damage. By pushing geographical boundaries, art practitioners can speak about matters often difficult to discuss in their own countries, creating spaces to share their histories and experiences.

As society expands and evolves, old structures of identity and belonging are being reconsidered. I tend to think that communities are united rather than separated by what shapes them politically and socially, including questions of identity. The same applies to artistic practice. In recent years, the art world has begun to break different boundaries, bypassing the imposing limits of nation and geography. In this context, art can help explore various disciplines, histories, and epistemologies. Through reorganising practices of resistance, remediation, and mutual care, art can generate reparative and transformative processes for damaged ecologies and communities.

Artists who address concepts of ‘belonging’ reframe familiar issues of identity, such as the ‘immigrant experience’, through their individual perspectives and stories. In this year’s Sigg Prize, Trevor Yeung’s work gestures towards the emancipation of everyday aspirations and deploys the non-human as a metaphor for human relationships. Drawing inspiration from personal and intimate experience, Yeung embraces authenticity as a framework for being in the world. He pairs his observations on immigration and belonging with reflections on aspects crucial to our understanding of the self. In her artistic practice, Yu Ji conducts ongoing investigation into situations charged with geographical and historical narratives. She is the storyteller of complex relationships between people and things, life and the ‘spirit’ of simultaneous presents and contested pasts.

One doesn’t need to be based in a foreign country or labelled with stereotypes of national identity to feel alien(ated), ‘Asian’, or in the case of both artists, ‘Chinese’. Artists living in the West do not engage with identity politics solely because these qualities—who we are, where we come from, how we look—mark them as different. The same applies to European artists working in the Greater China region. Rather, both the outsider gazing inwards at society and the insider conscientiously administering artistic remarks draw their reflections from their own experiences, autobiographical narratives, and social constructs. Artists think about life envisioned and make observations on belonging based on their identities as they question authenticity and its performance. Crucial to one’s understanding of the self are gender, ethnicity, social class, style, and desire, shaped amid a complex cultural context and set of social relationships that create nodes of belonging and community. Artistic engagement and the display or discussion of art, sometimes within the specificity of local contexts, can be impactful acts changing communities and their narratives.

There is no doubt that art can engage with difficult questions of identity. I would argue that there are commonalities, in this day and age, that bring people together in deeper and stronger ways than ethnicity or nationality. More urgent questions to ask: What can art bring to the conversation? What are the most pressing issues that we should discuss? Can art demonstrate a sustainable model of coexistence? Will art continue to have a place in the future where our own survival, in the most capacious sense, is at stake?