Fungai Benhura and Hybrid Aesthetics in the Framework of Homi Bhabha
by Charlotte Xu · 13 December 2025
When Fungai Benhura’s blade cuts through the paint layer, it is not merely a material experiment, but also a cultural deterritorialization practice in a post-colonial context. The "archaeological" creations of this Zimbabwean-British artist enter into a profound dialogue with Homi Bhabha’s theory of Hybridity. Taking this theory as a framework, this essay analyzes Benhura’s works to explore a core proposition: how cultural identity achieves emancipation in the interstices of power, and how such emancipation acquires visual representation through artistic practice.
The Paradox of Mimicry: Generating Difference Through Repetition
Homi Bhabha astutely points out in his theoretical system that the colonial power’s demand for the colonized to "mimic" Western culture, intended to consolidate the ruling order, inadvertently creates conditions for its own subversion. The individuals produced by such mimicry—"almost the same, but not quite"—become precisely "the nightmare of colonial authority".
Fungai Benhura’s reinterpretation of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in his work Shooting Stars serves as a visual testament to this theory. While retaining Van Gogh’s iconic subject matter and color palette, the artist deliberately eschews the Dutch master’s most representative brushwork, instead employing an original drilling and grinding technique to penetrate the surface layer of the painting, allowing the heterogeneous colors beneath to emerge. More notably, he embeds an abstracted group portrait of three embracing figures under the starry sky—a form that pays homage to Zimbabwe’s stone carving tradition while transforming a Western modernist landscape into a carrier of African collective memory.
This creative strategy profoundly echoes Bhabha’s theoretical insight: the true power of mimicry lies not in the accuracy of replication, but in the differences inevitably generated during the process of copying. Through rewriting rather than reproducing, Benhura not only participates in the reconstruction of the art historical canon, but also establishes his own creative subjectivity that resists assimilation.
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"The Starry Night" is an oil painting created by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh in 1889 at a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, and is now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Fungai Benhura, Shooting Stars (2025), Acrylic and paper on canvas, 100 x 120 cm ©EY PROJECTS ©Fungai Benhura Photography：Burn Li
The Third Space: A Liminal Zone of Cultural Negotiation
Homi Bhabha’s theory of "the Third Space" refers to an arena of engagement existing between cultures. This space is "neither one nor the other, but something else besides", a productive realm where cultural meanings are constantly renegotiated and redefined.
On Fungai Benhura’s canvases, we witness the materialization of the "Third Space". Western oil painting materials and non-traditional techniques such as drilling, grinding, tearing and chiseling undergo a profound chemical reaction under the artist’s intervention. When the surface layer of the canvas is scratched open, what is revealed is not just the underlying pigments, but also the interweaving and dialogue of different cultural memories across multiple times and spaces. This opened-up space belongs neither purely to the Western oil painting tradition nor can it be simply categorized within the African art lineage; instead, it generates an entirely new visual form that defies definition by established frameworks. These scratches and holes become the visible imprints of culture in the process of negotiation.
Fungai Benhura, Lazy blue (2025), paper and acrylic paint on canvas, 40 x 60 cm ©艺外 EY PROJECTS ©Fungai Benhura
The Politics of Hybridity: Identity Construction Beyond Binary Oppositions
Homi Bhabha’s concept of Hybridity is by no means a benign theory of cultural fusion, but a profound political strategy. By exposing the falsity of cultural purity, it dismantles the binary oppositional structures upon which colonial discourse relies—civilized/barbaric, West/East, center/periphery.
Fungai Benhura’s creative methodology can be regarded as a vivid practice of this strategy. His process of "layer-by-layer superimposition followed by etching and stripping" is not merely a technical procedure, but also a metaphor for cultural politics: the construction of identity is never a one-way process of acceptance or rejection, but is accomplished through a dynamic interplay of constant accumulation and peeling, construction and deconstruction. The deliberately preserved scratches and the half-revealed underlying colors declare the impossibility of a pure cultural origin, while simultaneously demonstrating the potential for generating new subjects through cultural hybridization. In this sense, Benhura’s canvases become symbolic landscapes of post-colonial subjectivity.
The faint underlying colors and the traces that hover between destruction and creation in his works consistently resist fixation by a single interpretation, remaining open to multiple readings. This visual ambiguity, as Bhabha argues, is not a flaw in expression, but a strategy of resistance—it subtly dismantles the classificatory mechanisms that underpin the operation of colonial power by refusing to be clearly categorized. Within these seemingly unfinished canvases lies an aesthetic freedom that rejects definition.
Fungai Benhura’s works thus transcend pure aesthetic experience to become a profound political practice, prompting viewers to rethink the right to write history and the authenticity of culture. For Chinese audiences who are not typically part of the colonial narrative, their significance does not lie in forcing them to adopt a binary colonial/colonized mindset, but in presenting a more universal experience of contemporaneity: the present we inhabit is itself a complex structure composed of superimposed layers of different cultures, replete with traces of rupture and repair. Every layer the artist peels away from the canvas invites us to examine the concealed layers and unspoken histories within our own cultural identities.
Fungai Benhura’s artistic practice, through its unique visual language, transforms Homi Bhabha’s abstract theory into a tangible aesthetic experience. Before his canvases, we witness a quiet yet profound cultural revolution: not through intense confrontation, but through subtle negotiation; not by pursuing a pure return to origins, but by embracing the generative potential of hybridity.
These canvases, peeled back layer by layer, ultimately reveal perhaps the core insight of Bhabha’s theory: true emancipation does not lie in returning to some imagined pure origin, but in having the courage to create one’s own new language, new forms, and new life amid cultural hybridity.
Fungai Benhura, Erased (2025), paper, acrylic paint on wood, 30 x 30 cm ©艺外 EY PROJECTS ©Fungai Benhura
Fungai Benhura, Observers (2025), paper, acrylic paint on canvas, 120 x 100 cm ©艺外 EY PROJECTS ©Fungai Benhura
Peel My Heart Layer by Layer will be exhibited at EY PROJECTS from November 1 to December 27, 2025, inviting audiences to step personally into this productive "Third Space".
