Hương Ngô: Core Memory is an exhibition that synthesizes the artist’s reflections on her family's time in refugee camps in Hong Kong and their experiences as new immigrants in the US. Woven throughout the exhibition is a series of cyanotypes created solely from sunlight and water at the edge of a body of water. An image of the weather and waves of the day, they are also stand-ins for the refugee body, battered by the elements and an artifact of their resilience.
These cyanotypes lead to the most recent body of work that is inspired by the artist's desire to learn about her parents’ labor as assembly line workers in electronics factories, a common occupation amongst this demographic of Southeast Asian Refugees. At these factories, her parents created capacitors, resistors, and motherboards – components which modulate tempo, pitch, and memory in electronics. Using these vintage components, she creates circuits as sculptures that gesture towards her parents' creativity, efforts not legible in the output of their wage labor.
Elsewhere, Ngô includes embroidered core memory using ferrite core and conductive thread and copper on diaphanous silk organza. Core memory, the method of binary memory storage before semiconductors, is transformed through embroidery, taught to Ngô by her mother as her first art form. Here, memory is physical, bodily, deeply resonate, and difficult to forget.
These works were made with the support of the Camargo Foundation, Lucas Artists Residency Program, 3Arts Chicago, Artist Communities Alliance, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Chicago.