Vân-Nhi Nguyễn

2023

It took me so long to finally see the landscape of the city that I grew up and live in, Hanoi. At its most chaotic, she would appear in front of all of us who dare to make a life in this city - thinly veiled in a layer of smoke and dirt, yet saturated and almost vibrating in colorful patterns and textiles, surrounded by a mirage of rows of steel balconies and gates.

In a contaminated medium, photography is examined by looking at its connection with one’s own and the mass. Through staged, idealistic domestic pictures, and collages made from images from personal biography, and others that intersect with the “prosthetic memories”- the massive amount of content that we have access to now, that constitutes to the public imagination, I look into ways that I can create a world parallel to this, yet untethered from western thought paradigm.

“Mother Dearest”, an in-progress project that continues the world-building of my previous work, using the maternal figure as a gulf between lived experience and delineation. Images of people indoor, fractured, camouflaged and inhabited and immersed in their desires and wants, yet exposed and clear cut. The sovereignty of the mother figure in each image explores the role of the people inhabiting an image plane, aided by construction of the interior. The figure acts as a presumed origin to then corrupt and/or build it up through props and stages. In these, the system of building up layers of the photograph, the wallpapers, furniture, outfit and the protagonist the series survey how the female self is articulated. Expanding my investigative framework into the domestic and its secrecy, to elaborate and mythify it via carefully staged photographs, fueled with dreamy, spiritualistic elements and usage for commonplace objects to form an image that brings forth everything at once: politics, aesthetics, ethics, histories.

During the Vietnamese refugee crisis (boat people) in the 70s, as the southern Vietnamese people found themselves in a new land, struggling to make a living for themselves yet send pictures back home showing beautiful sceneries or themselves happy, is that being or acting? Code switching, a linguistic concept, refers to the movement between multiple languages or dialects. This notion can be seen in a lot of younger Vietnamese people mixing Vietnamese and English together, stumbling to express an idea and crafting a new identity for themselves that is far from their own, by assimilating with western ideologies/ something starkly different from themselves. In a postmodern mediascape where our performed selves and interior selves have merged in intricate and unruly ways, are being and acting not only indistinguishable but key informants for one another?

While the city is growing at a comical rate, there exist refugiums of familiar memories - collages of different groups of people occupying a corrupted surface. People seen in these found images are separated away from one another, either by failing systems in power, or have passed, amidst the chaos. Using collage to generate a new form of cohabitating between individuals who were pushed away from each others, they serve as a network of community of a form of freedom fit for the present day: not as unconstrained, wild abandon but as the freedom to generate own lived reality outside failing systems of power. It is like a paradox is at play. The collages express this need to stop denying one thing, in order to absolve another, and how this can open the possibility for more relations within an image surface to accumulate.

In this city, marked by absurdities, crises, and injustices, the work delves deep within, seek for its own clues of its own whereabouts.

Vân-Nhi Nguyễn

As You Grow Older

Mother Dearest

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