Pulitzer Prize-Winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and exhibited artists Ann Le and Phung Huynh will discuss their experiences of displacement and conflict and their lasting impact on subsequent generations during a virtual conversation on Saturday, December 5.
Hosted by USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena and moderated by Vietnamese-American filmmaker Quyên Nguyen-Le, the webinar, “Conversations@PAM: Southeast Asian Refugee Narratives,” begins at 2:30 p.m.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” is a New York Times bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are “The Refugees,” “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” and “Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.”
Nguyen is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at USC. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. His most recent publication is “Chicken of the Sea,” a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison.
Ann Le works through identity, culture, family history, and the duality of becoming Vietnamese-American. Inspired by the cultural contexts in her life, she correlates the artificial with remembrances of generational trauma. The sentiment is vital in her works as she questions her personal experiences to construct imposing art. She excavates her lineage by revisiting her family’s experiences by using personal and found images to reconstruct slippages in time and history.
As layers of images are stacked upon one another, Le travels through time commenting on the idea of home, displacement, separation, and how we embrace and conquer loss. Tragic and poetic composites are pieced together to unravel narratives that places her Vietnamese-American perspective into a contemporary landscape. Ann Le is a first-generation Vietnamese-American born in San Diego and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice is primarily in drawing, painting, and public art. Her work explores cultural perception and representation, where she challenges beauty standards by constructing images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery to unpack how contemporary cosmetic surgery can create obscurity in cultural and racial identity. Her current work of drawings on pink donut boxes explores the complexities of the refugee experience in Southeast Asian communities.
Huynh has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in countries such as Germany and Cambodia.
Quyên Nguyen-Le is a queer Vietnamese American filmmaker whose narrative and documentary films have been shown in various film festivals, universities, art galleries, and community spaces internationally.
The webinar is free to attend. Registration is required.
To register, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/
