As a new mother, I am particularly moved and excited to be part of this upcoming exhibition, curated by Laurel Nakadate, with work made in collaboration with Hồng-Ân Trương. This image from its last iteration at Leslie Tonkonow Gallery with our work next to Yoko Ono.

New Mexico State University Art Museum will open the very first art exhibit at its newly constructed University Art Museum in February 2020.

“Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020” features the work of Tracey Baran, María Berrío, Patty Chang, Lenka Clayton, Amy Cutler, Joey Fauerso, Tierney Gearon, Kate Gilmore, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Mary Kelly, Justine Kurland, Marilyn Minter, Laurel Nakadate, Hương Ngô and Hồng- Ân Trương, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Laurie Simmons, Wendy Red Star and Mickalene Thomas.

The exhibit, including a range of “planned interactive and engaging programming looks at motherhood in its various forms, from a universal truth and ubiquitous creative act to a solitary and individual experience that changes everything in a woman’s creative life,” said UAM Director Marisa Sage, who is co-curator of the exhibit along with New York-based photographer and filmmaker Laurel Nakadate.

The exhibit “addresses and challenges the documented human experiences of motherhood and the ways the mother and childrearing have been perceived and portrayed in art, both historically and in current popular culture,” Sage said. “Building upon the multitudes of conversations happening globally, Labor looks at motherhood through the lenses of empowerment, empathy, intimacy, selflessness, vulnerability, failure, anxiety and choice.”

“There have always been an abundance of artists making work about mothers and motherhood,” Nakadate said, “but until recently, many galleries and institutions have not created a space for that work. Our hope is that providing a platform for this work can create a forum for conversations to take place, and for artists ruminating within this realm to find one another.”

Read more here.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

—Ida B. Wells

Gallery 400 is pleased to announce its early 2020 exhibition Turn the Light, which features five artists whose in depth projects are representative of the most vital art practices in Chicago today. In Turn the Light artists Herman Aguirre, the Floating Museum, Jin Lee, Hương Ngô, and Jefferson Pinder examine particular histories that are crucially present in our current lives and ask critical, often confrontational questions about why these histories have not been fully scrutinized. The works presented, in painting, photography, sculptures, video, performance, and installation—though thoughtful, nuanced, and multi-faceted—derive from a sense of urgency and necessity to reckon with suppressed histories.

In the U.S. and in Chicago, contests recur over our collective historical responsibility. The question is how can decolonization and equality be pursued without addressing the ills of the past, or without following Ida B. Wells’ insistence on turning the light of truth upon the oppressions of the past and the present? Pioneer Chicago forces, from Wells to today’s Jamila Woods, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Rudy Lozano, have helped to establish what can be called a Chicago sensibility that emerges from a tradition of solidarity, protest, resistance, and nourishment. The artists in Turn the Light build on that legacy, representing, historicizing, and materializing an evolution of what can be traced as Chicago’s revolutionary ideology. Their works ask viewers to move beyond contemplation and reaction but in absorbing the artwork, to reconsider the past and engage in grappling with the complexities of today.

Read more here.

Looking forward to being artist in residence at MANA Contemporary for 2020.

The University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery presents “Her Name Escapes Me,” an exhibition of recent works by Chicago artist Hương Ngô opening with a reception from 6:30-8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 24. The free exhibit will remain open to the public through Thursday, Nov. 21. Ngô’s work connects language and power in the understanding of how colonial ideology is enacted on bodies of women.

In conjunction with this exhibit, Ngô will present an ECCE Speaker Series visual lecture from 5:30-6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 24 in Brookens Auditorium, located on the lower level of Brookens Library. As part of her ECCE Speaker Series presentation, Ngô will deliver a visual lecture entitled “To Name It is to See it: Identity and Misrecognition” that articulates her use of visual art and performance to examine issues of colonialism, immigration, citizenship, intersectionality, marginalization and resistance.

More information here.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art is putting the art of the Vietnam War into historical context with two new exhibits that are in conversation with each other. 

The Smithsonian's “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975” is being called the most comprehensive collection of American art that features the impact of the Vietnam War. Taking off where the Smithsonian's ends, Mia's “Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War” highlights the perspective of Minnesota artists from the Southeast Asian diaspora.

More information here.

Excited to present recent work to the Vanderbilt community.

Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficient. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguisticmestizaje, the subject of your burla.Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos—we speak an orphan tongue.

– Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” 

Taming a Wild Tongue brings together recent bodies of work of Hương Ngô that span video, sound, works on paper, and publications that make material the oft invisible traces of living between languages. Drawing from performances, interviews, and archival research, Ngô lingers on moments ofuntranslatability as urgent reminders of displacement, colonial histories, and spaces of resistance. Invoking the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Taming a Wild Tonguecomplicates the double bind of traduttore, traditoreby foregrounding the argot and lived experiences of diaspora communities in the production of knowledge.

The exhibition will feature a publication with two newly commissioned essays by translator Dương Mạnh Hùngand Alejandro T. Acierto, Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media in the Department of Art and Program of Cinema & Media Arts at Vanderbilt University.

This exhibition and its additional programming are made possible with the generous support and partnership with the Vanderbilt University Programs of Asian Studies and Cinema & Media Arts.

Opening reception: Friday, September 7th 5:00-8:00 pm

“She made him her slave with opium. She suffered his rage when there was nothing to smoke... she wanted to keep him all to herself – and did – until the day he died.”
- Jean Hougron, Reap the Whirlwind

“Now all is broken and my spirit is not longer haunted by these questions of marriage or maternity. Let’s speak no longer of the past! My only spouse, it is the Communist Revolution.”
- Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai

How were representations of the colonized female body introduced to the world and utilized to sustain the project of colonization? How do representations of these bodies afford or deny subjectivity, and how might we reconsider these women as political subjects seeking agency rather than flattened figures in history? In this exhibition of new work, Chicago-based artist Hương Ngô pairs early 1900s popular media from colonial Vietnam with her ongoing research of women involved in the concurrent anti-colonial movement. These piercing questions fueled her recent solo exhibition To Name It Is to See It (DePaul Art Museum, 2017) and are expanded upon in Reap the Whirlwind at Aspect/Ratio. While previous projects concentrated on the history of women who were a part of the resistance movement and their tactics of counter sousveillance, Reap the Whirlwind focuses on their foil–the hypervisible, exoticized concubine that was the subject of a number of novels and widely-circulated colonial postcards of the time.

Read more in the Press Release

Excited to share some new cyanotypes that I made while in residence in Cassis at the Camargo Foundation. They are included in a group exhibition Friend of a Friend, curated by Sibylle Friche, at DOCUMENT Space, Chicago. 

Absolutely floored and honored to be included in the biennial exhibition, New Photography, with the work The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold, made in collaboration with Hồng-Ân Trương. The exhibition is curated by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, and includes the work of: 

• Sofia Borges (Brazilian, born 1984)
• Matthew Connors (American, born 1976)
• Sam Contis (American, born 1982)
• Shilpa Gupta (Indian, born 1976)
• Adelita Husni-Bey (Italian, born 1985)
• Yazan Khalili (Palestinian, born Syria, 1981)
• Harold Mendez (American, born 1977)
• Aïda Muluneh (Ethiopian, born 1974)
• Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương (American, born Hong Kong, 1979; American, born 1976)
• B. Ingrid Olson (American, born 1987)
• Joanna Piotrowska (Polish, born 1985)
• Em Rooney (American, born 1983)
• Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, born 1982)
• Andrzej Steinbach (German, born Poland, 1983)
• Stephanie Syjuco (American, born Philippines, 1974)
• Carmen Winant (American, born 1983)

I am so excited to spend eleven weeks at the Camargo Foundation in their Core Program. It has been a dream of mine to return to the foundation since I was here in 2014 to begin the research that became To Name It Is to See It. I'm so thrilled to bring that project back to its origins, continue it further, and meet the other residents in this breathtaking location.