Phuong Nguyen: I Was Born Where You Are

‍‘I Was Born Where You Are’ is a collection of work that explores the ‘peri-human’ through orientalism/ornamentalism and its relationship to colonial history through oil painting, sculpture, and weaving.

Paintings of select objects are coded under the Western gaze to evoke a peri-human Southeast Asian woman. Porcelain, silk, delicate lotuses and other ornamental objects become alchemic attempts to evoke her presence and bring non-living objects to life.

In symbiosis with these still lives, the idea of the swamp is explored as a site where death and life, like the peri-human subjects, exist simultaneously. The swamp is neither dead nor alive, but is home to a spectrum of both extremes, becoming a place where the lines dividing the past and future are blurred and undone. For the artist, it becomes a mirror to the self as a racialized other: a human subject turned into an object; under the Western gaze, is neither fully alive nor fully not-living.