Who Owns The Light? effectively frames one’s time in the museum with a query whose grammatical simplicity belies its complexity. For Ngô, contained within the question of “who owns the light?” are questions about “who claims the authority over the production of knowledge?” and “who is allowed to benefit from that knowledge?” At the same time, because the word “light” could refer to the lit neon itself, the artwork refers to its own materiality, inviting conversations about conceptual art, language, capitalism and commodification. As an art museum on a college campus—two modern institutions that are, in many ways, the product of Enlightenment thought—SCMA is an ideal site to foreground these questions of how and whose knowledge is produced and circulated, valued and claimed.
