English artist Phil Collins explores the construction of identity, particularly in relation to the video or television camera. Reflecting his own experiences growing up in northern England in the 1970s and 1980s, his works often use music, television and pop culture to explore social situations and transcend language, social status and locality.

the meaning of style is a single-channel video projection filmed with a group of young Malay skinheads in Penang. The skinhead subculture first emerged in Malaysia in the early 1990s, and Collins was intrigued by the translation of an English working-class subculture into a South-East Asian context, finding connections to aspects of Malaysia's British colonial history and complex racial politics.