This Space Is for Lost Time marks a return to Hương Ngô’s early art practice of working with technology as subject and medium as she engages the history of her parents’ labor as assembly line workers in electronics factories during the 1980s–2000’s. At these factories, Ngô's parents, like many other Southeast Asian refugees, created capacitors, resistors, and motherboards – components which modulate tempo, pitch, and memory. Using vintage components from these very factories, Ngô creates delicate, free-form sculptures that uplift the labor and creativity of her parents, while also gesturing towards the complex and non-linear relationships amongst time, trauma, and futurity.

Outside of work, Ngô's family gardened, providing them access to the flavors and smells that reminded them of the home they left behind. For Ngô, it created: “a different timescale that didn’t require them to clock in. It asked for an awareness of the weather, a remembrance of last year’s harvest and failures, and patience to push past the present.” Ngô intertwines these very different keepers of time–the electronic components and plants–as potent symbols of labor, resilience, and care. Unruly vines disrupt gridded circuits, which now function as supports for a new tenderness to thrive.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ngô elaborates on intergenerational transmission of knowledge through collaborations with her young child, Khải. Recesses for creativity and criticality are woven into the gallery, physically carving out space for time to be lost: productively and beautifully.  

This Space Is for Lost Time, TSA, Chicago, IL (curated by Noah Hanna) *solo exhibition