.png)
A Collaboration of Hmong, Vietnamese & Korean Artists
No Place Like Home:
The Diaspora
Oct 11 - Nov 24, 2024
_JPG.jpg)
about the exhibition
on view: oct 11 - nov 24th
“No Place Like Home: The Diaspora” is a collaborative exhibition exploring home through the lens of the Vietnamese and Korean diaspora artists based in the United Kingdom, merged with Hmong, Vietnamese, and Korean artists situated in Minnesota. The first two iterations of this exhibition occurred at the Canning Gallery (London, UK) in 2022 and then at the Museum of the Home (London, UK) in 2023. The group of artists explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging through the lens of their familial heritage and their own experiences of resettlement or upbringing in their host country.
The curators, KV Duong and Laura Migliorino, pair four London based artists with four Minnesota based artists. Minnesota is host to the largest Hmong population in the United States, and began resettling Vietnamese soon after the end of the Vietnam War. Vietnamese refugees first arrived in Minnesota as refugees in 1975, following the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War. The United States arranged for the evacuation of over 125,000 members of the South Vietnamese military, their families, and others who had supported the U.S. in the war. A second wave of over two million Vietnamese refugees arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s as "boat people", fleeing the repressive communist government. Additional Vietnamese immigrants have arrived in the U.S. under family reunification rules in the subsequent decades.
The group of artists explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging through the lens of their familial heritage and their own experiences of resettlement or upbringing in their host country.
upcoming events
Exhibition Reception
Friday, Oct 11th @6PM - 8PM
Located at XIA Gallery & Cafe
Join us for the exhibition of "The Art of Resistance" by Zhi Kai Vanderford. Vanderford is a transgender artist, activist, writer, and elder. This exhibit curates the artwork he's created while incarcerated in the last 37 years. The exhibit curates four different themes: identity & transformation, prisons & policing, police violence, and friends.
Saturday, Oct 19th @11AM - 12PM
Meet the Artists - Colonialism, Immigration, and Displacement
Please join us for a robust conversation about the role of colonialism, immigration, war, and displacement from an Asian perspective. The artists will share their personal stories of a shared diaspora from multiple countries weaving together what they have in common and how their experiences are different. The artists will talk about the content of their work and their creative practice, medium, process and what they hope to express to the viewer.
This event is free and open to the public
Meet the Artists: A Panel Discussion
Saturday, Oct 19th @11AM - 12PM
Located at XIA Gallery & Cafe
Join us for the exhibition of "The Art of Resistance" by Zhi Kai Vanderford. Vanderford is a transgender artist, activist, writer, and elder. This exhibit curates the artwork he's created while incarcerated in the last 37 years. The exhibit curates four different themes: identity & transformation, prisons & policing, police violence, and friends.
Friday, Nov 22nd @6PM - 8PM
GENERATIONS BEFORE ME | A Live Performance by Bethany Lacktorin
Expressed in words, wind, song and sound we turn over the layers of this land. A system of integration was evident in the remnants of my own adoption. Whatever methods of assimilation were carried out here, while it may not have been where those methods originated, and indeed not where they ceased, it was a place where they most certainly took hold.
In 2016, Korean-adoptee Bethany Lacktorin created My Ocean, a sound + performance installation at Ordway Prairie. In 2017 a sequel performance installation was held at the West Central Research & Outreach Center (WCROC) Horticultural Display Garden for the Rural Arts & Cultural Summit at U of M, Morris titled, A Steady & Irresistible Wind. Poems, prose and song taken from both pieces will be performed by Bethany Lacktorin and The My Ocean Shape Note Singers.
Live Performance by Bethany Lacktorin
Friday, Nov 22nd @6PM - 8PM
Located at XIA Gallery & Cafe
Join us for the exhibition of "The Art of Resistance" by Zhi Kai Vanderford. Vanderford is a transgender artist, activist, writer, and elder. This exhibit curates the artwork he's created while incarcerated in the last 37 years. The exhibit curates four different themes: identity & transformation, prisons & policing, police violence, and friends.
meet the artists
KV Duong
United Kingdom
KV Duong is an ethnically Chinese artist with a transnational background—born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now living as a queer person in Britain. He examines the complexities of Vietnamese queer identity, migration, and cultural assimilation through personal and familial history. During his MA studies at the Royal College, he has created works on latex, highlighting its historical connection to French colonial rubber plantations in Vietnam, while simultaneously embracing its sensuality and symbolic association with the queer experience. The recurring motif of a door or portal signifies access and the limitations imposed by societal constructs, particularly those associated with colonial and LGBTQ+ history.
Recent exhibitions include ‘No Place Like Home’ (Museum of The Home, 2023) and ‘Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here’ (Migration Museum, 2022).
Bethany Lacktorin
Minnnesota
Bethany Lacktorin is a performance artist, producer, community organizer and musician based in rural southwest Minnesota. A Korean adoptee, Bethany’s practice explores issues and meaning surrounding identity, displacement and human connections to land, place and shared experience.
Bethany is a sound designer/composer with 20+ years in the field. Bethany studied violin at Lawrence University, received her AAS in Music Production at McNally Smith College of Music and BFA in Experimental Media at Prague College School of Art & Design. She is
currently the Executive+Artistic Director of Little Theatre Auditorium in New London, MN.
.jpg)
Cường Minh Bá Phạm
United Kingdom
Cường Minh Bá Phạm (b. 1988, London, UK) works between / in / nearby / at the intersections of sound, community, and archives. He is interested in learning (and unlearning) our understandings of history, community, movement, family, sound, language, memory, and how they can inform, challenge, or be influenced by power, knowledge, and / or subjectivity.
Sound work can encompass radio art, or DJing, but also research, writing, and translation. He is particularly drawn to cover songs from the pre-internet age, as he likes to speculate on how songs get translated and exchanged or how the simple act of singing can be a form of solidarity across communities and borders.
At the community level, he works with vulnerable communities in London and Hanoi, such as those who are homeless, undocumented, or marginalised due to a lack of care from the state. This work ranges from translation and assisting people with accessing medical or public services to sitting on various boards. Cường’s artistic practice is heavily informed by community-based approaches that prioritise collaboration, accessibility, and multivocality.
Archives are the final area in which he works. He is the co-founder of An Viet Archives Steering Committee, which oversees the largest known collection of documents, photos, and other objects relating to the British-Vietnamese community experience currently held at Hackney Archives. He understands that only certain communities have had access to publishing and printing and input into how the archive is catalogued or organised. Therefore, he is a believer in community participation in the archive, which will give space for us to recontextualise the past, thereby allowing us to understand the present and imagine new futures
Duong Thuy Nguyen
United Kingdom
Duong Thuy Nguyen (b. 1991) is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer based in London, who explores the intricate connections between nature and urban environments. Her artistic practice delves into the profound impact of rapid urbanisation on the vanishing rural landscapes of northern Vietnam. After graduating from Central Saint Martins with distinction, Nguyen's Master Fine Art project was awarded as a winner of the Maison/0 This Earth Award and shortlisted for the Mullenlowe Nova award and the honour mentioned Cass Art prize in 2023.
Her insightful writings have been featured in publications such as Art and Market, Ocula Magazine, and Plural Art. Moreover, she emerged as the winner of the art writing competition, FRESH TAKE 2023, hosted by Art and Market. She is the co-founder of An.OtherAsian, an artist collective that curated and organised exhibitions at London venues including Ugly Duck and the Koppel Project in 2022. Notably, Nguyen curated the celebrated Dreams of a New Moon exhibition events in honour of the Lunar New Year 2023 at Central Saint Martins.
Nguyen has contributed to various artist talks and panel discussions at prominent institutions like the Migration Museum and the Museum of The Home, where she offers valuable insights into the Southeast Asian art scene.
Genie Hien Tran
Minnesota
Genie Hien Tran (Trần Phan Minh Hiền) is a visual artist and designer from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.Her artistic practice often takes the form of collage, design, poetry and installation in order to explore the complexity of home, belonging and identity. She has exhibited at Public Functionary Gallery, White Bear Center for the Arts, Rochester Art Center, MCAD Gallery 148, Suitcase Gallery, Pablo Center at the Confluence, Foster Gallery, Cherry House Art Fest and is published at Volume One Magazine, Leader-Telegram, Twas zine, TWIG Magazine, and UWEC Flipside Publication. She received her MFA in Visual Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2022 and BFA in Illustration at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2018.
Pernilla Iggstrom
United Kingdom
Pernilla Iggström is a Swedish artist and curator based in Brentwood, Essex, England. She received her BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2011. Iggström’s art practice (oil painting, collage and performance art) and curatorial investigations are both an exploration into cultural identity from a nature/nurture point of view. The focus is on diversity, inclusion and community. She hopes her art will inspire the viewer to reflect on their own cultural heritage, increase an understanding of others and thereby break down stereotypical and pre-conceived impressions.
Tshab Her
Minnesota
Tshab Her is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on embroidery and textile. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago as a second-generation Hmong American woman raised by refugees fleeing the “secret war” in Laos. Within the context of immigration, displacement, war, religion, and womanhood, Her’s work grapples with the tension of belonging in search for personal agency and cultural autonomy. She uses paaj ntaub, a traditional Hmong textile art, as a tool for storytelling by confronting intergenerational trauma and identity as a modern Hmong woman navigating patriarchy and American hegemony. Her received a Bachelor of Fine Art in studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and currently lives in Columbia Heights, Minnesota working as a wardrobe stylist for Femme Retale and makes earrings under It’s Pronounced Cha.
Xu Yang
Minnesota
Born and raised in Minnesota, Xu, a Hmong-American visual artist, found inspiration in his family through their perseverance and connection to one another, which deeply influenced his visual perspective. Growing up in a close-knit Hmong family, he developed a passion for capturing the intersection of tradition and modernity, reflecting the experiences of his heritage. After moving to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), he expanded his practice with experimental techniques, blending his family's history with broader themes of identity, diaspora, and belonging. His artwork explores the nuances of cultural memory and the beauty found in both intimate family moments and the shared experiences of the Hmong diaspora