'Making Home' Artist Talk and Zine Workshop: Phung Huynh

Schedule

Saturday, June 4, 2022
1 p.m. Artist Talk followed by Q&A
2 p.m. Break
2:15 p.m. Zine Workshop with Phung Huynh

Registration is required; capacity for the Zine Workshop is limited.
Register Now

Phung Huynh joins Asia Society Texas for an artist talk and zine-making workshop related to her works exhibited in Making Home: Artists and Immigration. The artist welcomes guests to take part in an interactive class to develop multidisciplinary storytelling skills as Huynh guides them through creating their own personalized publication.

Making Home: Artists and Immigration focuses on immigration and related themes through the works of Phung Huynh, Beili Liu, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. The exhibition engages with the individual, lived experiences of immigration through the paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and installations of the four featured artists. Making Home centers the complexities of deeply personal histories of immigration, as the artists consider topics of intergenerationality, the repercussions of colonial histories, dislocation, memory, otherness, belonging, and resilience.

About the Artist

See NPR Morning Edition's coverage of Phung Huynh's works »

Phung Huynh  is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice is primarily in drawing, painting, and public art. Her work investigates notions of cultural identity from a kaleidoscopic perspective, a continual shift of idiosyncratic translations. The contemporary American landscape is where she explores how “outside” cultural ideas are imported, disassembled, and then reconstructed. In an overwhelmingly diverse metropolis such as Los Angeles, images flood our social lens through mass reproduction and social media, taking on multiple [mis]interpretations and [re]appropriations. Such reflections have guided Huynh in re-stitching traditional Asian iconography within the loosely woven fabric of American popular culture. There is a purposeful “Chinatown” aesthetic in Huynh’s paintings, alluding to kitsch souvenirs that tourists purchase and the commodification of eastern icons into tchotchkes. Huynh considers how cultural authenticity disintegrates within a capitalist framework, and she paints images of Chinese cherubs, lotus, and carp with a “pop” veneer of delight and horror to challenge the viewer with a western-leaning perspective. 

Huynh’s current work is informed by her experience as a refugee of Cambodian and Chinese descent from Vietnam. Inspired by her family’s migration story, personal research, and interviews with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, Huynh makes drawings on pink donut boxes and cross-stitches images of personalized California license plates with unanglicized names. Her work unpacks the complexities of immigration, displacement, and cultural assimilation. Each drawing or cross-stitched piece is meant to be a sensitive portrayal of a unique personal story. Close to 90 percent of California’s donut shops are mom-and-pop businesses run by Cambodian immigrants or Cambodian Americans (Khmericans). The trend that links pink boxes with donuts can be traced back to the Khmerican donut ecosystem. Ultimately, Huynh’s work is rooted in the practice to unravel ideas of cultural representations and stereotypes, to challenge how we consume and interpret ethnographic signifiers, and to de-center whiteness in constructing visual and historical narratives. 

Huynh received her BFA in Illustration from Art Center College of Design, and her MFA in Studio Art from New York University.

Website: http://www.phunghuynh.com/home.html

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phungxion/