The artist Teresa Chen (www.teresachen.ch) began a dissertation as a way to extend her own artistic practice by exploring how contemporary visual artists – especially women with (East) Asian diasporic backgrounds – express ideas or meanings about Otherness and issues of belonging in their art. Using proposed set of categories, her methodology was a comparative analysis of selected pairs of artists – where at least one was a woman artist of (East) Asian diasporic background. The results of her research confirmed the significance of cultural, historical, and geographic experiences on both the conception and reception of visual art and indicated that various artistic strategies have the potential to expose and undermine culturally constructed meanings of difference. In this lecture, she outlines some of the main arguments and themes from her research.

Dr. Teresa Chen