Sprouting

Trophy commission 2022

The trophy for Françoise van den Bosch Award winner Chequita Nahar is about hybrid cultural identity. It visualizes a clear connection to a natural element that crosses borders: a tree. By going from raw material back to its original. Xinyao Ding created the trunk of a tree out of paper. Ding sees this process as a metaphor for searching and discovering one’s identity, living and practicing in a different cultural environment.

The work reflects on returning to one’s roots but also becoming more than those roots, reevaluating all different aspects of identity. In breaking down fixed norms into other perspectives of new cultures, the shards and remnants of the old leave beautiful colorful and shiny marks that create new impressions.