Hương Ngô
b. 1979, Hong Kong
Lives in Chicago
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Hương Ngô’s installation explores translations across cultural contexts and across objects, beings, and ideas. She uses archival imagery and printed media to draw together the histories of French colonial practices around agriculture, labor, economy, and environment in Vietnam and Louisiana. In both colonial encounters, the French attempted––and failed––to import their form of silk trade. As Ngô details in her newsprint takeaway, the Vietnamese had a thriving silk industry that the French disrupted with the unsuccessful introduction of their own silkworms and different technologies, and the establishment of the silk industry in Louisiana likewise failed, overtaken by cotton. While reproductions of archival materials displayed in the handcrafted case show images of colonial farming in Vietnam, the artist has framed and preserved images of branches taken from mulberry trees in New Orleans, an invasive reminder of the presence of French colonialism.
Ngô is keenly aware of how these histories reverberate in the present—in the populations of Vietnamese, Native, and Black people who have passed through and remain in Louisiana and in the altered landscape that we inhabit today. The hectograph-print posters hanging from the rafters declare in Louisiana Creole, Kouri-Vini, and Vietnamese: “We are still here.” These low-tech, highly accessible prints created using a water solution reference the Communist anti-colonial movement that employed this medium to swiftly disseminate sensitive information. In New Orleans, hectography takes on added layers of meaning because the printmaking process relies on the use of water, a force that has brought commerce and life to the port city while harboring potential violence. The newsprint takeaway that accompanies this installation, along with the other forms of print material, details the artist’s own interventions into these histories, weaving together seemingly disparate narratives to reveal and fill crucial gaps in the archives.
ABout the artist
Hương Ngô’s history growing up as a refugee in the American South informs her lines of inquiry on colonialism and migration in her interdisciplinary, conceptual practice. Through multivalent interrogations of language, she mobilizes personal and collective histories to make visible larger structures of power and subjectivities of often marginalized populations, such as early twentieth-century Vietnamese revolutionary women. Ngô searches archives for the artifacts and texts that inform her work, translating these items from historical objects into art. Ngô received a grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program in Vietnam in 2016. Among other galleries and institutions, her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the New Museum, New York. She earned a BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2001), an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and was a studio fellow at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2012. She is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Hương Ngô, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks