This practice-led photographic research project explores how negotiating Eurasian identity through an autoethnographic lens can contribute to the increasingly vexed conversations and studies about cultural identity and allegiance in contemporary Australia. 

From the perspective of a female Eurasian Australian, the research proposes that cross-cultural identity is constituted and performed through a combination of physical characteristics, locations and spaces, diaspora cultures and emotional values. Using an autoethnographic approach to developing contemporary visual investigations of Eurasian identity, the research focuses on the individual’s agency within ideas of positionality, the gaze and how its relationship to difference is mediated, disrupted and adapted.

Contemporary digital photographic methods, including the language of self-portraiture, still life, documentary and archival family photography, are framed by theoretical concerns of hybridity, performativity, difference and belonging. The research gives weight to the role of artist curator to generate greater influence, enable discussion through a multiplicity of voices and create a community of practice to engage with global concerns about otherness, belonging and migration.

Within contemporary Australian culture, there has been limited artistic investigation into the representation and exploration of the Eurasian experience. This research project contributes to a rising interest in mixed-race and multiracial studies globally, with its originality in contributing an artistic voice to Eurasian identity in Australia, one that is an ever-growing and significant part of the nation’s cultural landscape.

Pia Johnson

19 May 2021.