Body Art Expression on the Inner World of Diaspora Reflecting Homi K. Bhabha’s Concept of Hybridity

Abstract

Entering the 21st century, racial and cultural hybridity has become mainstream and people’s desire for art and design has increased. A diaspora, a group of people not belonging to any community, political party, or culture, become ‘the others’. They are confused with their identity and live in a modern hybrid cultural society. In today’s trans-national world, a diaspora’s hybrid identity plays a positive role in handling ‘global discourse’. First, this study investigates the fundamental meaning of a diaspora and Homi K. Bhabha’s hybridity, which explains the doctrine of creating a cultural boundary from a postcolonial perspective. Second, it derives two antagonistic cultures through the flow of aesthetic knowledge and design in a multifaceted perspective, such as art and philosophical concept, considering the confusion resulting from cultural conflicts as an aesthetic attribute of ‘opening’. Third, this study is significant in that it expresses the inner world of a diaspora, reflecting hybridity as a new form of bonding through the human body, taking Homi Bhabha’s third space as the creative space of cultural heredity. The ultimate goal of this study is to prove that body art can be transformed into a new form of formative art by converging open thinking about art/beauty elements and performing differentiated studies. Furthermore, it is anticipated that the study results would help set a direction for body art, taking the diaspora’s hybridity as an aspect for interdisciplinary studies across art, culture, and philosophy from a convergence perspective.