Much of Kate Beynon’s art revolves around her personal experiences of hybridity, and the complexity of adequately representing her identity as an Australian with Welsh, English, and Norwegian ancestry on her father’s side and Chinese-Malaysian ancestry from her mother. Her work speaks to some of the complexities of identity negotiation in a multicultural (and increasingly transnational) society and resists simplistic or singular representations of migrant identity. Beynon’s work has evolved its own distinct lexicon, which draws on the visual genres of Eastern and Western comic book graphics, Chinese calligraphy and late-twentieth-century graffiti art. Many of her works are inspired by old Chinese stories and folk heroes, which she re-presents in modern situations. One of her most enduring representations is Li Ji, based on a fourth-century Chinese heroine who stepped outside her traditional cultural boundaries and saved her village from a giant python. In Beynon’s work, Li Ji appears reincarnated into the modern world in different guises as a symbol of the ‘global’ citizen.^[41] Where is your original home was one of 11 prints based on the animated video work Li Ji: Warrior Girl, 2000, where Li Ji is portrayed as a Chinese Australian young woman on a journey into Melbourne’s Chinatown. As she travels by tram and later on foot, she experiences flashbacks to her past life as the Li Ji from the 4th century fable.^[42]  

In the 2001 work, Where is Your Original Home?, Li’s face appears to be exploding from the canvas like a cartoon punch. Beynon presents her protagonist against a backdrop of what appears to be writing in both graffiti tag-style and kanji script. The text that frames Li’s face is stylised but readable as the question, ‘Where is your original home?’—a phrase that was taken from the socializing section of a Chinese language guide which Beynon took to China when she visited for the first time in 1995 on a study tour to learn Chinese. She comments, ‘I was interested in how the intention of this question can vary from friendly and conversational, to hostile and exclusionary.’^[43] The phrases evoke Beynon’s ambivalence regarding assumptions commonly made about her cultural identity. In certain social contexts, asking someone ‘where are you from?’ immediately renders that person ‘out of place’—a foreigner. Many non Anglo-Australians will be familiar with the scenario of being asked by a stranger, ‘where are you from?’. Answering with ‘Wollongong’ or ‘Brunswick’ or ‘Mt Isa’ then leads to the all-too-familiar ‘But where are you really from?’. Underlying the seemingly innocent question, a number of assumptions about territoriality and belonging are being played out.

While Beynon’s work has often been included in exhibitions of ‘Asian-Australian’ art, her practice revolves around a reiteration of the complexity of personal identity. Beynon says her work explores

Figure 7.4 Kate Beynon, Where is Your Original Home?, 2000;digital photographic print, 90 x 84cm; Courtesy of the artist and Sutton gallery, Melbourne.

Her insistence on the multiplicity of her personal identity (her complex hybrid self) evokes one of the interesting effects of contemporary multiculturalism, which is the privileging of ethnicity over other aspects of identity (gender, class, sexual orientation or social status, to name a few). Within this model, people tend to be accorded a single dominant ethnic identity, irrespective of their personal history. This is equally true of those of Anglo-Australian descent. Recently, Andrea Witcomb has commented on the rise of multiculturalism as the primary means of representing diversity in Australian museums.^[45] The same can be said of public culture writ large. While 30 years of multiculturalism have not successfully shifted some of the older stereotypes of Anglo-Australia, they have been very successful in making the concept of migration and ethnic diversity a primary locus for debating and defining cultural diversity within public culture. These presentations of ethnicity promote the idea that a person has only one dominant ethnic self—and that this ethnic self dominates all other aspects of identity.

As Kate Beynon’s work suggests, this rendering of identity is far too simplistic. According to the Australian demographer Charles Price, around 45 per cent of the total population has three or more ancestries. “Moreover,” he adds, “it is clear that many Australians of mixed ethnic origin are not simply mixtures of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh, but have at least some elements of non-Anglo-Celtic in their ancestry.”^[46] While people are often required to assert one dominant choice of ethnicity, the reality is that they are likely to see themselves in far more complex ways. Likewise, at any given time, other markers of identity will predominate over ethnic heritage. Thus, in the flux of everyday living, people will self-select different aspects of their identity according to changing social contexts. Multiple variables contribute to identity and, for many people, ‘ethnicity’ might be the least relevant on a personal scale.

The politicians who drafted the original framework for Australian multiculturalism were aware of the complexities of this issue. In its original incarnation, Australian multiculturalism, as represented by Grassby, was intended to shift older hegemonic models of Anglo-Australian identity and to equalise differences.^[47] However, in the model of ‘cultural difference’ which has emerged under (or perhaps despite) three decades of multiculturalism, only some people are deemed different. Anglo-Australians have been portrayed as a single homogenous ethnic group which has enduring values rather than diverse cultural origins, while all other Australians have been portrayed as having an inescapable surfeit of culture which somehow prevents them acting as individual agents capable of making personal and autonomous (rather than culture-group) decisions.