This Monumental Xu Bing Installation Helped Me Embrace My Taiwanese American Identity

Seeing Xu Bing’s monumental exhibit Tianshu (Book from the Sky) had a profound effect on me. I wrote about how an invented Chinese language helped create a space for my identity as a diasporic Taiwanese American, and how Tianshu reminds me of my dad’s work as a translator.

“Tianshu evokes that feeling of loss—of something missing, of a flaw that spoils the whole. The work affirmed my diasporic position of standing outside and looking in, of being denied access to something that was familiar but just out of reach. It challenged what had always felt to me like a binary definition of identity: Either you are Taiwanese or you are not, with language being the litmus test I would never pass. Tianshu opened up the possibility of a third space for someone like me who was neither an insider nor a foreigner, but in between.”

• Read the full essay in Artsy.