Abstract
The research intended to reveal the possibility of manifesting collective cultural belonging in contemporary creative practices at a time of intensified flows of images, symbols, and artistic forms between global cultural spaces. It was carried out in 2025-2026 as an empirical qualitative inquiry based on 60 publicly available visual and design artefacts from Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. For the purpose of a balanced comparison, the corpus was divided into three equal parts: 20 examples of contemporary visual practice, 20 examples of applied and media-oriented creative production, and 20 examples of digitally mediated or institutionally framed projects. The analysis showed that cultural belonging was not expressed through a single stable visual formula. It was a set of recurring markers that directed the viewer back to shared memory, local material culture, and recognizable forms of place-based identity. These markers came from heritage motifs, craft techniques, textiles, costume, ornament, landscape, historical memory, language, typography, museum narratives, and digital adaptation. The most frequent references were those of heritage and craft which appeared in 38 out of 60 units. These were followed by the curatorial framing of collective memory, in 34 units, and global adaptation of local visual forms, in 31 units. Five major models of representation include heritage continuity, historical re-narration, regional ecology, institutional translation, and hybrid adaptation. In contemporary visual practice, belonging was primarily expressed through memory, trauma landscape, displacement, and symbolic ambiguity. These forms did not simply describe identity but created a visual space in which collective experience could be felt, reconsidered, and sometimes deliberately unresolved. Applied creative production, in contrast, relied more directly on material and recognizable cultural codes–textile, ornament, costume, souvenir forms, archival fragments, and public installation. Results indicate that while in certain ways, globalization may have altered local distinctiveness significantly, it did not erase it. The markers of culture retained meaning as long as they were connected to memory, embodied practice, and material forms of culture. At the same time, however, the markers transformed once they were in museums, in digital space, in public spaces, and in international exhibition systems where the local signs began speaking to their communities as well as to wider global audiences.