Who am I?

Ink Pen on Paper

"Who am I?" is a  series of work that shows my understanding of my acceptance with my own culture.
I was born as the 4th generation of the Chinese ethnic in Malaysia. I was grown up in a rural place name Tuaran, a village that is near to the capital of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu. Students with different ethnics were merged together in a class, there were no such things of cultural barrier or racism. But during my teenage life, I slowly see the difference in culture. I moved to the Kota Kinabalu and studied in a Private School, Sabah Tshung Tsin Secondary School. There I was surrounded by mostly Chinese ethnic's people, rarely any other ethnics students nor teachers will be around the campus. 
This is when I reach Invercargill to further my studies in Visual arts. The cultural differences suddenly intrigued my curiosity. People around me started to ask questions like, Where do you come from? I thought Malaysian are mostly in dark coloured skin, why are you not? 
That moment, I felt my mind has been corrupted with questions I could not answer. Should I be a Malaysian Chinese or just Malaysian? After sometimes, I came to a conclusion. What is in my blood stays in my blood, but the society will shape who you are today. The beauty of merging will lead a person to create something extraordinary by combining one culture into another. Like the dragon is shown in each piece of work. Traditionally, a dragon doesn't normally associate themselves with any female character, but the merge creates another message to the viewer. The combination of both seems to be the representative totem of the female character. Dragon signifies power, luck, wealth and the son of kinds, while the female character reflects me. I believe we view things in the present, not in the future or pass. Just like "Who am I?", that visualize the person I want to be, not what the people are going to criticize based the past and present.