One half of the collaborative practice SLIPPAGE with Hwafern Quach, Melbourne-based artist Phuong Ngo explores interpretations of history, memory, and identity within the Vietnamese diaspora.
Read MoreAdelaide-born Phuong Ngo examines family histories and diasporic identities in his practice. Ngo's parents came to Australia as refugees, initially arriving in Melbourne before moving to Adelaide, where most of their Vietnamese community was resettled. Ngo's early work, Welcome to My Place (2009) featured the artist's personal family photos, and told stories of their experience of building a new life in Australia.
Phuong Ngo graduated with a BA (Honours) in Asian Studies and International Relations at Adelaide's Flinders University in 2005. He later moved to Melbourne to study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), graduating with a BFA (Honours) in 2012. In 2022, Ngo gained his PhD in Fine Art at RMIT.
Phuong Ngo's conceptual practice is rooted in archival processes. Drawing from imagery, objects, footage, oral histories, and actions, of both historic and personal archives, Ngo forms connections between ideas of culture, politics, memory, and place.
Phuong Ngo's Vietnam Archive Project (2010–ongoing) is a collection of documents, slides, photos, and objects that relate to the personal and collective histories of local and diasporic Vietnamese communities. By 2017, the artist had accumulated over 10,000 items.
For the exhibition, Conflicted: Works from the Vietnam Archive Project (2017) at The Substation in Melbourne, Ngo presented items from the archive to explore a nuanced interpretation of the Vietnam War, through the eyes of servicemen and women.
Other archive projects include the Bull Horn Cake Research Centre (2020–ongoing), for which the artist methodically collects and preserves the croissant-shaped Vietnamese bull horn cakes from bakeries in Australia.
First executed in 2014, Phuong Ngo's performance Article 14.1, named after the asylum clause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, engages with his family's perilous journey to asylum in Australia.
Phuong Ngo's parents and brother were among the one-to-two million people who fled Vietnam at the fall of Saigon in 1975. Previously, for My Dad the People Smuggler (2013), the artist visited the site of the former United Nations refugee camp at Pulau Bidong, Malaysia, where his family stayed for several months after fleeing Vietnam.
For the ten-day performance Article 14.1, Ngo re-lives his family's experience at sea, living and sleeping in the gallery space with the same supplies his parents had on their boat. To pass the time, the artist folds origami boats from 'hell bank notes', and converses with the audience. At the conclusion of the performance, Ngo burns the origami boats in a ceremony to remember the estimated 500,000 Vietnamese people who died at sea.
Phuong Ngo's 'Racist Paintings' series (2020–ongoing) explores themes of language, colonialism, eugenics, and oriental ideologies through hard-edged abstraction. Using a palette of 'Dulux Oriental' colours, Ngo creates compositions on plywood with lines that allude to key colonial structures. The paintings are also affixed with French colonial postcards from Vietnam.
Ngo further expanded this series with 'Collaborative Racist Paintings' (2020), for which the artist worked in collaboration with others. Upon receiving a dipytch primed by the artist, the collaborator was invited to alter one half of the diptych in a way that related to notions of race, racism, or colonialism.
Alongside his independent practice, Phuong Ngo collaborates with Chinese-Vietnamese contemporary artist Hwafern Quach under the collective name SLIPPAGE. Since 2018, the pair have worked in ceramics and other mediums to explore history, geopolitics, and economic issues through cultural and linguistic references.
SLIPPAGE's ten-part Mooncake project (2018–ongoing) examines China's history of expansionism, and their present position in the South China Sea. For the first iteration of the project, the artists piled up 888 celadon glazed mooncakes cast from traditional North Vietnamese handmade moulds. For each successive iteration, a further 888 mooncakes are added, in response to China's expanding reach.
Phuong Ngo has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions include Nostalgia for a Time That Never Was, The Substation, Melbourne (2022); Article 14.1, Sydney Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); Conflicted: Works from the Vietnam Archive Project, The Substation, Melbourne (2017); Domino Theory, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2012).
Select group exhibitions include This language that is every stone, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022); Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2018); Obscura Festival of Photography, Penang (2016); The Sievers Project, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2014).
Phuong Ngo's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
