history as hypnosis (2023) was the first work of mine to grapple intentionally with the war. I used my brother Matthew Nguyen’s poem “Cu” as a point of departure; it recounts this tragic, darkly funny, and ultimately complex childhood experience which involved being driven to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum [in Washington, D.C.] in an old, used limousine by my uncle who immigrated to US as a refugee of the war.
The limousine my cousins and I would ride around in was not a high-end limousine, nor was my uncle working as a limousine driver. He told us that he drove his son around in it to raise his social class. Reading my brother’s poem about all this, I realized: It really happened. I didn’t hallucinate it.
I’m interested in having people feel things more than I want a work to be understood. history as hypnosis opens with three women riding in a limousine through a desert car wash. For a brief moment, we see a dead body lying in dirt at the bottom of the car, but you never see him again. I wanted the viewer to possibly forget about it as the film progresses and the characters simply go about their lives in LA. I didn’t realize this until midway through making the work, but the dead body functions as a kind of metaphor for the war, at least for me personally. According to conventions of traditional narrative film, you aren’t supposed to introduce a dead body and then not resolve it. But I wanted to create something that felt more in line with the way history actually unfolds: it’s not always resolved, and there’s often this sense of amnesia.
I also performed in that work: performance has become a way for me to synthesize ideas and research, which I find much more exciting than making an essay film or exhibiting documents in a vitrine. Perforation, Ellipse, currently on view at Storefront for Art Architecture, involves a durational performance where I shoot arrows at an off-screen target on a downtown rooftop. It lasts for exactly two rolls of 16mm film. I’m interested in time as it relates to cinema, memory, and what Henri Bergson calls “lived time.”
Perforation, Ellipse is a multichannel video work mixing everything from direct painting on celluloid, to narrative passages, to cover songs performed on YouTube. Vietnamese bolero [also known as nhạc vàng, or “yellow music”] was the basis for my film Aisle 9 as well as my new work. In Vietnam people were put in jail for making these deeply sad love songs during and after the War, but 50 years later, it’s just all over the Internet. I’m drawn to these blips in history or in media where you can see how an object has changed over time in terms of its mythology and how it’s situated within culture.
The Storefront show also includes works with gold on aluminum featuring screen-printed handwritten scores and notes from Vietnamese Bolero composers. I really liked the idea of gilding documents from this genre that’s been intentionally left out of many archives and bringing them to an institution.
I tend to find myself probing deeper into these holes in history and into the archive, asking questions like: Where do censored materials ultimately end up? And where was the resistance to this censorship that may or may not have been recorded?
In Vietnam, there is a very strong culture of “if you know, you know.” The look of parts of Aisle 9 is based partly on a covert artist bar and a queer bar I visited on a 2020 trip. In Vietnam, you can’t gather [due to political regulation], so outside the building there was a tiny red light. When you walk in, it just looks like somebody’s living room, but the further inside you go you realize that there’s a sequestered bar and sprawling subculture in the back.
I don’t want to reject history; I want to create new ways of seeing and interpreting. Going deeper into history surrounding the war has made me more aware of living with ghosts—those of the past, the present, and future-past. —As told to Emily Watlington
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Alison Nguyen (b. 1986 in Wilmington, Delaware; lives and works in New York) is the subject of a solo show on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture through March 28.
