Sunshine’s Phuong Ngo is exhibiting artwork based on his Vietnam archive of more than 20,000 items at The Substation in Newport.
Conflicted: Works from the Vietnam Archive Project comprises large-scale installations and items from his archive of slides, photos, film reels, documents, maps and objects relating to the Vietnam War.
His collection started in 2010 when Mr Ngo stumbled across a group of slides from the US on eBay. He bought the lot out of curiosity and his archive ballooned from there.
Mr Ngo said his archive was driven by a quest to find out more about his identity and that of the wider Vietnamese diaspora since the fall of Saigon in 1975.
With the rise of Pol Pot and the ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese people in Cambodia, his parents fled to war-torn Vietnam before coming to Australia as “boat people”.
“It’s about internal conflict, about the war and my position on the war,” Mr Ngo said of his exhibition.
“So, looking at environmental degradation, extreme poverty in Vietnam that’s occurred as a result of the war, but then being a beneficiary of war as well as a child of refugee migrants who has benefited from education here and a free health care service.”
Conflicted: Works from the Vietnam Archive project runs until July 1 at The Substation, 1 Market Street, Newport.
