Artist Bio
As a Vietnamese-American artist, my primary artistic source material for the last decade has been my personal history and experiences as a female immigrant. Through my artmaking, I investigate my cultural and identity as well as my migration story through photography, video, installation and performance art.
I received a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Photography/ Video from Southern Methodist University. I have exhibited and taught photography, painting, linoleum, performance art, and concept-driven workshops nationally and internationally.
My works are in permanent collections of Amarillo Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Center for Photography at Woodstock among others. I was recently awarded the 2023 Second Sight award from Medium Photo and my work is on the front cover of Southwest Contemporary Magazine vol 6 recently published this August.
I live and work in Tucson, Arizona, where I am the head of the photography program at Pima Community College.
Artist Statement- A is for Alphabet
Originally conceptualized as videos, “A is for Alphabet” explores the struggles of mastering a new language, such as the difficulty with pronunciation and the discomfort of those moments. Here, the viewers hear a native English speaker, my collaborator for these video pieces, reading aloud words and phrases from A to Z, and myself struggling to repeat those words. This duet echoes the way in which I would practice English in Vietnam in attempts to master it. Surprisingly, during the continued act of repetition and performative articulations, words became meaningless, nonsensical babble, rather than building blocks for coherent speech. Both the English learner and the native English speaker became confused, and the meaning of the scripted words was muddled or lost, along with the language’s colonial power. This active undoing of linguistic dominance of the English language—the tongue of the colonizer—is an act of a decolonial practice.
The tight crop compositions force the viewer to focus on the movements of the tongue and mouth, while confronting the awkwardness of repetition and the ultimate breakdown of language.
In Vietnamese culture, we have a proverb saying: “Lời nói là bạc” translated to English as “Words are silver.” To connect these videos with my Vietnamese heritage and native language, I decided to work with silver-based materials. A set of English alphabets is crafted from pure silver to symbolize the essence of the English language’s building blocks. A series of still photographs is printed on gelatin silver prints (the analog black and white prints, where silver halide suspended in a layer of gelatin on fiber-based paper, they are developed using the three-bath chemistry of developer, stop, and fixer). This series represents a moment when a word is formed and while its audible presence is absent, its visualization was recorded by the exposed silver on the gelatin silver prints.
Education
2006 Painting Sculpture workshop, Prof. James Cook, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona USA
2006 Photographie workshop, Prof.Sama Raena Slshaibi
2003 Internationale Sommeracademie for Bildende Künstler – Visual Culture Studies workshop, Professor Katharina Sieverding, Austria
1998-2002 Akademiebrief – Diploma in Fine Arts -Kunstakademie Düsseldorf – Art Academy Düsseldorf, Germany
Studied Performance and sculpture, Professor Klaus Rinke
1996 -1998 Kunstakademie Maastricht – Art Academy Maastricht, Studied monumental painting, artist Felix von Beek