The Life Between Two Places
Many immigrants feel like they belong to two worlds because leaving one place rarely means fully arriving in another. The first country continues to live inside the body through language, habits, humour, food, family memory, weather, and old emotional codes. The new country slowly enters through different routines, streets, documents, friendships, and ways of being seen. This is not a simple split, but a layered condition. It is one of the reasons I often return to doubled faces, mirrored figures, and divided bodies in my artwork: one person holding more than one inner geography at once.
Belonging Does Not Always Become Simple
Belonging is often imagined as a clear destination, but immigration makes it more complicated. You may belong to the place you left through memory, language, childhood, and family, while also belonging to the place where you build your current life. Yet neither belonging feels completely effortless. The old place may no longer fit in the same way, and the new place may still ask for translation. In my drawings and art prints, this tension appears through figures that seem connected and separated at the same time, as if identity has learned to stand in two rooms at once.
The Native Self And The Translated Self
One world often exists in your native language, and another exists in translation. These two selves can feel different. In your first language, you may have speed, humour, history, and emotional precision. In another language, you may feel slower, more careful, or strangely simplified. The immigrant self becomes double not because it is false, but because each language reveals and hides different parts of the person. This is close to the feeling I try to create in symbolic portraits: faces that are present, but not fully readable, as if part of the inner life remains behind another layer.
Memory As A Second Country
For many immigrants, memory becomes a second country. It is not only a record of the past, but a place the mind keeps returning to. Streets, rooms, smells, voices, seasons, and small rituals can become more symbolic after leaving. They stop being ordinary and begin to carry emotional weight. This is why repeated motifs matter so much in my work. A flower, an eye, a border, a dark shape, or a mirrored face can behave like memory: returning again and again, never exactly the same, but always carrying something from the first place into the present.
The New World Changes The Old One
Living in a new country does not only change how you see the present; it also changes how you remember the past. Distance can make the first world feel clearer, stranger, more painful, or more beautiful. You begin to notice what once seemed invisible. Customs, gestures, fears, and expectations become readable because you now have another culture to compare them with. This creates a double vision. In my posters and wall art, I often use symmetry and distortion for this reason. The second face does not simply repeat the first. It changes how the first face can be understood.
Two Worlds Inside One Body
The feeling of belonging to two worlds can be tiring because the body has to carry both. It carries the accent, the documents, the memories, the new habits, the old reflexes, the desire to adapt, and the desire not to disappear. But this double belonging can also become a form of depth. It gives a person several ways to read a room, a conversation, a symbol, or a silence. A divided figure in an artwork does not have to mean brokenness. It can mean expanded perception: the self becoming wider because it has learned to live with more than one centre.
Why Two Worlds Belong In Symbolic Art
The immigrant feeling of belonging to two worlds belongs naturally in symbolic art because it is difficult to explain in a straight line. It is emotional, cultural, linguistic, bodily, and private at once. For me, this is why the theme enters my drawings, posters, art prints, symbolic portraits, and wall art so often. Two faces, two directions, two colours, or two mirrored bodies can hold what ordinary language simplifies. They show identity as something carried between places, not as a problem to solve, but as a complex inner structure still changing shape.
