Art Without Borders: Transcultural Adaptation, Hybridity, and Cultural Dialogue in Visual Arts

Transcultural adaptation in visual arts has emerged as a significant field of inquiry in an increasingly interconnected cultural landscape. Unlike approaches that understand artistic influence primarily through the binary categories of source and derivative, transcultural adaptation foregrounds movement, negotiation, reinterpretation, hybridity, and cultural dialogue. Artists working across geographical, linguistic, historical, and ideological boundaries frequently transform images, symbols, techniques, narratives, materials, and aesthetic traditions from different cultural contexts to produce new visual languages. Such practices complicate conventional assumptions about cultural authenticity and artistic ownership while simultaneously creating opportunities for dialogue and contestation. This paper examines transcultural adaptation as a creative and critical practice through which artists negotiate cultural identity, migration, colonial histories, globalization, gender, race, memory, and belonging. Drawing upon adaptation theory, particularly the work of Linda Hutcheon and Robert Stam, and connecting it with Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the “Third Space,†the paper proposes that adaptation should not be understood as a subordinate relationship between an original and a copy. Rather, adaptation is a productive process of transformation in which meaning is relocated, recontextualized, and renegotiated. The paper traces the historical roots of transcultural exchange through trade, religion, empire, colonialism, migration, and modernism before examining contemporary practices through selected artists including El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, Chitra Ganesh, and Kehinde Wiley. Particular attention is given to the ethical tensions surrounding cultural appropriation, unequal power relations, authenticity, representation, and ownership. The paper further investigates the digital and technological transformation of transcultural creativity, including social media, virtual exhibitions, algorithmic art, and artificial intelligence. It argues that AI-generated visual culture creates a new form of transcultural adaptation while simultaneously raising questions concerning datasets, authorship, cultural bias, consent, and the ownership of collective cultural knowledge. Ultimately, the paper contends that transcultural adaptation can function as a transformative form of visual dialogue when it acknowledges historical power structures and treats cultural difference not as a resource for extraction but as a space for reciprocal engagement.