Alex Rasmussen is a graphic designer, photographer, and visual artist interested in exploring queer identity, accessibility, and storytelling. Their work engages with our cultural perceptions of identity, as a transracial adoptee, or as they are ethnically Chinese with a white adoptive family. Through photomontage of family photography and toys, they question our definitions of family, gender roles, and racial identity. These distortions reflect the complexity of lived experiences outside of power paradigms communicated by popular culture.
StatementIn this series ‘Chinese Born ???,’ I am examining my identity as a Trans-Racial adoptee, or that my white adoptive parents adopted me from China, through photomontage and miniature dolls to explore the tensions inherent to ‘American’ and ‘Chinese American’ identity the former which is long be conflated with whiteness and the latter as ‘foreign outsiders,’ despite the fact the real complexity outside the narrow conceptions of either identity. Both components illuminate on the manufactured, constructed nature of these labels where one group are stereotypes of one culture and another as ‘typical.’ These tensions are further revealed by using my grandfather Kodachrome slides from the mid-20th century, a time when American culture codified the nuclear family as ‘the default
CountryUnited States
