By Ewen McRae
Sunshine West artist Phuong Ngo hopes a new exhibition starts a conversation.
Ngo has contributed to Those Monuments Don’t Know Us at Bundoora Homestead.
The exhibition features works from artists who bring diverse perspectives and cultural narratives to notions of “belonging” in Australia.
Ngo said his work dealt with French colonialism in Vietnam and how that has impacted on the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia.
“The work consists of 300 or more photographs from the Saigon marketplace, from the colonial period right up until the (Vietnam) War period,” he said.
“They’re displayed in perspex, hanging from red string and held together with a Chinese knotted tassel, which builds on the idea that the South Vietnamese community here holds a strong connection to French colonialism and there’s an allegiance attached to it. Vietnam was colonised by China and ruled for 1000 years by them until French colonialism, so there’s a lot of different elements to the Vietnamese people.”
Ngo hopes his work, Colony, gets people talking about their own histories and how they relate to living in modern Australia.
“The work really looks at how we talk about European expansionism, and also pulls in the fact that we kind of omit that there are other factors as well,” he said.
“A lot of my work is about digging back into history, so this one was the starting point for me going back beyond the war and looking at identities and how that influences our thinking now.”
The exhibition will be at Bundoora Homestead, 7 Prospect Hill Drive, until May 5.
