Cross-cultural experience and cultural identity construction in museums: the influence of Sino–foreign co-curated exhibitions on audience cultural cognition

Amid the intertwined forces of globalisation and multiculturalism, museums are shifting from monolithic cultural display toward becoming key arenas for cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Sino–foreign co-curation has emerged as a principal form of such collaboration. This study focuses on the “cultural dialogue” mechanism embedded in these exhibitions and examines the dual pathways through which cultural identity is produced both at the curatorial level and within audience experience. Combining case analysis with semi-structured interviews and grounded-theory coding from both perspectives, the study proposes a Curator-Side Cultural Identity Construction Model and an Audience-Side Cultural Identity Formation Model, which are further inturther integrated into a unified Curator–Audience Dual-Perspective Cultural Identity Model. The findings indicate that the curatorial pathway follows the sequence “exhibition design—meaning construction—identity orientation,” whereas the audience pathway unfolds as “perceptual trigger—exhibition perception — cultural understanding — identity deepening.” Although these two pathways differ in their points of departure and internal logics, they interact and converge within the exhibition space through “cognitive convergence nodes.” The study argues that Sino–foreign co-curation is not merely a pooling of resources but a platform for cross-cultural communication and cognitive negotiation. Accordingly, stronger coupling between curators and audiences is necessary to enable the real-time transmission, translation, and co-construction of cultural meanings and identities.