Meet the artists
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Meet the artists //
Quyen Nguyễn-Lê
Quyên N-L (Nguyễn-Lê) is a queer Vietnamese filmmaker born to boat refugee parents where Chumash and Tongva lands meet in Los Ángeles, California. Quyên's film work–spanning between documentary and scripted genres–focuses on the ways histories are deeply felt in the quotidian everyday. Nước (Water/Homeland) (2016) and Hoài (Ongoing, Memory) (2018) delve into the intersections of queer Vietnamese American identity. The two films are experimental explorations of the fragmented multilingual act of generational storytelling–and the psychic toll of its absence. Drawn from their 2022 film described as “a eulogy to the their mother's nail salon that permanently closed during the COVID pandemic,” In Living Memory of Nước (Water/Homeland) invites viewers into a space fragmented across memory and imagination, with the installation centering the refugee nail salon as a site connecting different but continuous histories.
Christina Hughes
Christina Hughes was born and raised in Orange County’s Little Saigon neighborhood in Southern California where her parents resettled as first wave refugees. Her academic research examines the entwined social histories of Southern California and Southeast Asia as interrelated sites constituted by militarism and police violence. Currently, her work traces the colonial continuities and carceral afterlives of the wars in Southeast Asia as they have come to shape the militarized deportation politics and technologies of the current ‘crimmigration’ state. One of the curators of RE/HOMING, Christina’s Infrastructures of Feeling looks to the devalued craft of crochet as a feminist methodology that takes seriously the affective and embodied politics of personal and collective grief. In salvaging materials no longer deemed useful and consequently thrown away, she considers how centering the constructive agency of the disposed works to realize abolitionist infrastructures of community care beyond extractive regimes of commodification and profit underwritten by corporeal and bureaucratic violence.
Ly T Nguyen
Ly T Nguyen (she/they) is a bilingual queer scholar, translator, and artist. Their creative and academic work is geared towards feminist practices and imaginations of collective liberation. Ly’s most recent public writing has been published with tiếng-thét and vănguard. Meanwhile their academic work thinks through the relationships between culture, language, queer dis/inheritance, refugee epistemologies, transnational activism, and intergenerational trauma in projects like Little Saigon Stories (San Diego, 2017-2019) and Alphabet for Social Justice Project (Minneapolis, 2021). Most recently, Ly co-founded Viet Artists for Palestine to educate and fundraise for displaced Gazans. One of the curators of RE/HOMING, Ly’s piece Motherlands explores feminine forms of forgetting and maternal worship.
Nhung Walsh
Nhung Walsh is a Chicago-based artist and curator from Hanoi, Vietnam who explores the intersection of personal history and collective memory through her work. Her practice, informed by Vietnam's postwar narratives and politics of war memory, blends art and curation in long-term, interactive exhibitions. Notable projects include Nối Projects (since 2012), Saigon Blueprint (since 2015), and the Vietnam Artists' Book Project (since 2012). She has also contributed to the Thailand Biennale (2018) and SIGGRAPH ASIA (2015-2020). Motherhood has shifted her focus to childhood and parent-child relationships, expressed through sound, photography, and painting. Her piece for RE/HOMING edits together the silences from an interview recording of a My Lai massacre survivor, challenging listeners to hear these "interstitial spaces" as challenging the fixity of history and opening alternatives for considering what else might have occurred that day.
N.
N. was born in Vietnam and grew up in the US. Interested in practices of storytelling and documentation, they were Interested in exploring state violence in the mundane and the organic. Their piece for the exhibit, Handle with Care, looks at rau muống (water spinach) as a classified ‘noxious weed’ and the politics of livability that determine what is native versus invasive in state administrative procedures.