Park Pictures’ Sean Wang Directs a Poetic PSA for TAAF About Dual Identity
July 23, 2025
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a surge of negative rhetoric and violence against the Asian community in the U.S. What followed was a powerful cultural awakening.
In partnership with Wieden+Kennedy New York, The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) has unveiled Asian+American, a campaign that shines a light on what dual identity means to the Asian American community. TAAF’s 2025 STAATUS Index found that only 20% of Asian Americans aged 16-24 (and only 23% overall) feel fully accepted for their racial identity, citing pressure to abandon culture, names or languages just to fit in, resulting in internalizing shame and self-doubt in the process. In the campaign’s 60-second film PSA, Beyond, Together looks toward a future where that identity is less of a binary, and more of a fluid interplay between cultural and national identity.
The complexity of identity
Beyond, Together explores the pressure to choose between a sense of self firmly rooted in national or cultural identity. The short film is directed by Sean Wang, whose 2024 film DiDi made giant waves in the awards scene after it premiered at Sundance International Film Festival early last year. In 2023, Wang was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for Năi Nai & Wài Pó about what he described as the “amazing, beautiful, and complex people that my grandmothers are.”
“We’re not caught between two worlds, we're creating a new one” is the overarching message of this PSA; the immigrant experience is one that is as related to individual expression as it is to a collective struggle of acceptance — and not one identity that fits into a box.
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