Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2009 > January-February 2009	Print View

Self in Street, 1998, silver gelatin print, by Phuong M. Do

Artist Phuong Do says photography has solidified certain images of Vietnamese people in the minds of Americans. They’re either “soldiers and veterans or massacred village people,” Do says. “I wanted to really challenge but also add to those images.” So she chose photography as the artistic medium through which to navigate personal and professional experiences of “conflicting allegiances to national and ethnic identity.”

In recent decades, globalization has brought many previously unknown, underappreciated, or inaccessible aspects of world culture to the fore. Among them have been works of contemporary Vietnamese art. The traditions of both the world art market and Vietnamese society, however, have resulted in the celebration of mostly male artists. The traveling exhibition “Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam” takes a significant step toward rectifying that imbalance.

The show, which opens at the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota’s east bank February 1, is the first major U.S. exhibition of Vietnamese female artists. Created by Nora Taylor, a professor of art history at the Art Institute of Chicago, the show

Food for Thought, 2005, watercolor on do paper, by Vu Thu Hien

includes watercolors, ink paintings, installations, and photography by 10 artists examining issues of identity, gender roles, and stereotypes in their work.

Do, one of the 10 featured artists in the show, was born in Vietnam and has lived in the United States since age 11. Through her photographs, which often feature herself or members of her family, Do explores the challenges, conflicts, and insights created by her dual Vietnamese and American heritage. “The intention of my work has always been to examine issues of ethnic and national identity,” Do explains. “I’ve never had a grounding in the physicality of where I actually belong,” she adds, illuminating her 1998 photograph, Self in Street, in which she stands in the middle of a residential road. In addition to her own feelings and thoughts of displacement, Do also draws on her work in refugee and immigrant services for many years. Her work included “developing leaders to represent and act as mediators between the refugee and mainstream cultures,” she says.

“Leadership transplanted from the homeland didn’t always translate here in the U.S.,” she explains. “A leader in Vietnam was not necessarily the best leader for the refugee community. So I’d try to engage young people with feet

Daughters of Mr. Nguyen II, 2005, gouache on paper, by Dinh Y. Nhi

in both worlds to become representatives, but they had to deal with elders shutting them out and, if they were women, gender issues.”

According to Weisman curator Diane Mullin, “Changing Identity” continues the museum’s ongoing commitment to schedule exhibitions “that give voice to underrepresented groups in the art world and particularly cultural groups that are contributing to the cultural diversity of the Twin Cities.” In the last year, other such exhibitions at the Weisman have included shows on contemporary Native American art and documentary photography from China.

For Do, “Photography is a real process in terms of conceptualizing, making, looking at, and revisiting that notion of not belonging and wanting to belong,” she says. Even today, as she looks back at images she made in the 1990s, she adds, “I feel a level of acceptance, but the memory of the emotions I felt then is always present.”

“Changing Identity” runs February 1 through May 24 at the Weisman Art Museum, 333 East River Road, Minneapolis.

—Camille LeFevre

For more information, images and commentary, visit the exhibit Web site here.