Neither Here Nor There — And That's Exactly the Point: Making Art When You Belong to More Than One World

The Question Nobody Asks Directly

Somewhere in the middle of a client presentation, or late at night staring at a half-finished canvas, it surfaces: Am I doing this right? Not technically right. Ethically right. Culturally right. When your creative work draws from two worlds — especially when one of those worlds belongs to a culture that isn't the dominant one in your country — the anxiety around authenticity can be paralyzing.

I've had this conversation with a lot of creative people. Graphic designers raised between Tokyo and Los Angeles. Illustrators who grew up in Seoul but went to art school in Chicago. Architects who trained in New York but whose visual instincts were formed by their grandparents' home in Kyoto. And the question is almost always some version of the same thing: How much of this is mine to use?

This piece isn't a rulebook. But it is an honest attempt to think through what it actually means to make authentic work when you're standing in more than one place at once.

The Difference Between Influence and Appropriation

Let's start here, because it matters and because it gets muddled constantly.

Cultural appropriation — in the design and art context — generally refers to using elements of a culture you don't belong to in ways that flatten, commercialize, or misrepresent them, often for profit, without acknowledgment or genuine understanding. It's the fashion brand slapping a sacred motif on a swimsuit. It's the agency using calligraphy as decoration without knowing what the characters mean.

Cultural influence is different. It's the thing that happens when you actually engage with another tradition — its history, its values, its context — and let that engagement change how you see and make things. Influence isn't extraction. It's conversation.

The line between the two isn't always crisp, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably oversimplifying. But a useful starting question is: Am I taking from this culture, or am I learning from it? Taking produces a transaction. Learning produces transformation.

What 'Authentic' Actually Means for Multicultural Creatives

Here's where it gets interesting — and where I think a lot of the standard advice goes sideways.

When people tell multicultural artists to "be authentic," they often mean: pick a lane. Lean into your Japanese side or your American side. Don't mix. Don't confuse people. Keep your brand legible.

But for someone who genuinely inhabits both spaces, that advice is its own kind of inauthenticity. Artificially separating two parts of yourself to make your work easier to categorize isn't honesty — it's performance. The actual authentic position, for a lot of us, is the tension itself. The in-between. The neither-fully-here-nor-fully-there.

That tension, when you stop fighting it and start working with it, becomes one of the most distinctive creative resources you have. Nobody else sees from exactly your vantage point. Nobody else has your specific combination of references, instincts, and contradictions. That's not a liability. That's your material.

Practical Approaches From Designers Living This Reality

I spoke with several creative professionals about how they navigate this in their daily work. Their approaches varied, but a few themes kept emerging.

Start with the 'why' before the 'what.' One brand identity designer who grew up between Osaka and Seattle told me she always asks herself why she's reaching for a particular visual element. "If I want to use a design principle from Japanese craft tradition, I need to know what I'm actually trying to communicate and why that tradition speaks to it. If I can't articulate that, I'm probably just decorating."

Acknowledge your references. Another designer, who does editorial illustration for several US-based magazines, makes a point of naming his influences explicitly — in his process notes, his social media, his client conversations. "I'm not trying to hide where things come from. The context is part of the work." This isn't just ethical practice; it also tends to make the work more interesting. Audiences respond to knowing there's a real lineage behind what they're seeing.

Resist the pressure to be the 'translator.' Several people I talked to mentioned the exhausting expectation that multicultural artists should always be explaining one culture to another. That their job is to make Japanese aesthetics accessible to American audiences, or vice versa. That role can be meaningful, but it can also be a cage. You're allowed to make work that isn't primarily educational. You're allowed to make work that's just... yours.

Sit with discomfort rather than resolving it prematurely. One illustrator put it simply: "My best work comes from staying in the uncomfortable middle longer than feels safe. The moment I try to resolve the tension — to make it tidy — I lose the thing that made it interesting."

When the Work Doesn't Fit a Box

One of the recurring practical challenges for multicultural creatives is market positioning. American design culture loves a clear story. Clients want to know what they're getting. Galleries want to know where to hang you. Algorithms want to know which hashtag to file you under.

Work that genuinely lives between traditions can be harder to pitch, harder to categorize, and harder to sell — at least initially. A few strategies that seem to help:

• Build an audience before you need clients. Sharing your process, your references, and your thinking online creates context around your work that the work itself can't always carry alone. People who follow your development understand your perspective in a way that cold contacts never will.

• Find your community in the in-between. There are more of us than you think. Organizations like the Asian American Arts Alliance, or online communities centered on cross-cultural creative practice, can connect you with people who get it — and who can refer work that's actually a good fit.

• Name your aesthetic on your own terms. You don't have to use someone else's category. Several designers I know have developed their own language for describing their work — not as a marketing gimmick, but because existing labels genuinely didn't fit. That specificity, paradoxically, tends to attract the right people.

The Long Game

There's no clean resolution to the tension of working between cultures. And I'd be suspicious of anyone who claimed to have found one. What there is, instead, is a practice — a continuous process of asking yourself honest questions, staying curious about your sources, being transparent about your influences, and trusting that the particular place you occupy in the world is worth making work from.

The space between two worlds isn't a waiting room. It's a studio. Some of the most interesting creative work being made right now is coming from people who stopped trying to choose and started making something from exactly where they stand.

That's not a compromise. That's a position.