Hermeneutic inquiry into art education provides a variety of theoretical tools and interpretational strategies to employ when we interrogate why we teach art in the way that we do, and thus, for example, expose the cultural bias of art practice and understanding. This study explores three different hermeneutic approaches to teachers’ identities constructed in art education based on the three categories: conservative hermeneutics, moderate hermeneutics, and critical hermeneutics. These hermeneutic understandings have an important implication for identity formation in art education: how different identities are formed within different hermeneutic frameworks. From the point of view of conservative hermeneutics, an interpretation reproduces precisely the meaning intended by the author/artist, and it supports the essentialist idea of identity. In moderate hermeneutics the interpreter is involved in a negotiation between the object to be interpreted and his or her contextual horizon which forms a fore-structure for meaning and sense to form. This implicates that identities are diverse and changing, in the symbolic systems through which we make sense of our own positions. Critical hermeneutics attempts to reveal systematic prejudices and biases or ideological positions that act to celebrate and include particular art practices and cultural identities, but in doing so exclude others which are equally legitimate. Therefore hermeneutic inquiry of identity formation provides an important implication to expose ideological interests and political forces embedded within institutionalized art education.