Inner Citadel

Inner Citadel is a digital art project addressing the loss of identity through diasporic experiences. It originates from an autoethnographic inquiry as an Asian woman with a constantly shifting geographical trace.
The concept of identity has always intrigued me in its polarising existence—the outer identity we present to society and the inner citadel we tend to retreat into. Our lived experiences continually reshape our outer identities, rendering new materials upon the previous ones, while our inner citadel quietly questions whether we are what we claim to be.
For the diasporic community, this becomes an existential crisis. Each act of integrating ourselves into a new space can mean the disintegration of our identities. We force ourselves to embrace diverse, culturally regulated forms of self-presentation, packaging ourselves with added identity tokens, while the inner citadel remains untouched, judging each new tag we put forward to validate our existence.
Rather than holding the conviction that we become more “solid” through this process, I want to question whether it instead facilitates the gradual dissolution of identity. The more materiality we dress ourselves in, the more disoriented we become when looking inward. In this sense, the outer and inner selves seem to play a zero-sum game; the confirmation and de-confirmation of “identity” continually interact in an offset dynamic. “Zero materiality” thus emerges as a question: ultimately, will the presented identity retain any meaning, or will our inner citadel itself face an inevitable vanishing?
Inner Citadel weaves together the dissolution of identity materiality, the tracing of blurred self-imaging, and the conflicting languages we employ for self-identification, inwardly and outwardly. Utilising 3D animation, digital tracking, and motion graphics, the artwork aims to challenge our perspectives on identity and take a deeper look into the mentality formed under diasporic flow.