Being A “Double Agent”: An ontological inquiry into the Other in intercultural everyday-life through auto-ethnographic and artistic approaches

This research is an investigation into the phenomenon of the Other from an ontological perspective in an intercultural everyday-life setting. It is centred by the classic concept of "the Other" in phenomenology, and is unfolded by tackling the setting of being where the non-Western subject experiences her subjectivity as the Other in a Western cultural setting. This research uses auto-ethnographical approaches to gather/create data that can express or reflect subtle and complex contexts of such a condition of being, and then analyses the data through crystallised lenses of various theories and art production. By doing this research, I hope to gain an in-depth understanding of being as a modern nomad in different cultures, especially as a human subject who chose freely to live and study in a drastically different cultural setting other than the home land. The intercultural experiences provide different perspectives of figuring out the World (or Worlds), but also bring up confusions of identity, subjectivity, and the ontological “crisis” that results from the shifting of perspectives and standing points of experiencing. Experiences as such require additional or alternative interpretations of otherness for the human subject in order to make sense of her own being