Starting Wednesday, September 14, Illinois State’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program will host the first of three annual student art installations in the Rachel Cooper Hall Gallery, Room 237. There will be an opening reception on Monday, September 19 at 4 p.m.
The annual series begins with Jade Nguyen’s photographic works which include both a photographic series of scenes from Vietnam’s everyday life and a self-portrait series.
“My self-portrait series,” Nguyen explains, “reflects my journey of re-navigating the relationship I have with the land I grew up in. With the landscape of Vietnam projected onto my body, I establish a connection between my two homes: the physical body and the hometown that appears on official identification documents.”
The series is an introduction to a larger body of work about Nguyen’s homecoming journey and how she comforts herself through displacement and detachment after her many years living abroad.
Nguyen reflects on her arrival in the U.S. at the age of 17 only to return to Vietnam years later following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The trip, although unexpected,” Nguyen explains, “allowed me to reevaluate my relationship between the country that I grew up in and my identity as a Vietnamese artist in the new diaspora.” Nguyen communicates to the viewer how her photographic subjects, “were no longer the uninspiring nothing-news that I had taken for granted for that many years but the vessels that reserved my way home in case I ever needed it again”.
Jade Nguyen is a Vietnamese photographer and an MFA photography student at Illinois State. Her exhibition runs through November 4.
