Alongside • Hương Ngô and Kim Garcia in dialogue
Hương Ngô and Kim Garcia are both artists and educators at University of California, Santa Barbara. This conversation took place over a collaborative document in October 2024.
Hương Ngô: I had the chance to visit your studio last spring, and it struck me that we were working through similar questions, but in very different ways. We’ve both been delving into our parents’ stories and how they connect to larger histories. Can you tell me about your current project?
Kim Garcia: It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to think of our practices moving parallel toward the same direction. plagued by longing is a project that began earlier this year. It’s a series centered on my father, who’s had permanent short-term memory loss since a near-death experience in 2004, and was recently diagnosed with dementia. His reflections on this life-changing event have become a way for us to explore his memories: growing up in the Philippines, his journey to America, and his deep longing to return to our homeland.
While I’m dealing with intensely personal subject matter, I’m also thinking about it in relationship to colonial histories in the Philippines and America’s role in that. There’s a power in disrupting linear historical narratives by focusing on the personal; I think this captures the complexity of Asian American experiences and helps expand on American identity.
I’m curious — how has working with your parents' stories influenced your latest projects?
A line and a long gaze, 2022, The Cold Read group exhibition at Phase Gallery, photo by Yubo Dong.
Ngô: I really appreciate your title for such a poignant subject and how it points to the tender slippages between/among longing and mental and physical health… as a condition that might be contagious, at least socially or generationally.
Much of my work situates my family’s stories within larger histories. My current body of work begins with my parents’ labor as a starting point. Both of my parents worked in electronics, semiconductor and computer factories when I was growing up, like many other Southeast Asian refugees who came to the U.S. because of the Vietnam War. While uplifting their creativity and resilience, the project also asks how we are indebted to this community not just for their labor, but also their radical ability to imagine a future after experiencing so much tragedy.
The project also points to the ugly underbelly of this industry, which has racialized and gendered the labor required to create it and the environmental pollution that is created by it, thus determining who pays for technological progress through their bodies and their health.
I’m wondering if you can elaborate on your use of materials to bring out your family’s stories through generally abstracted forms?
To Name It Is to See It (In Passing I), Hương Ngô, 2016, DePaul Art Museum, photo by Tom Van Eynde.
Garcia: Your project is so powerful; it reveals whose bodies are made vulnerable and what has been sacrificed for the American Dream. I appreciate its complexity. Even when conditions are less than ideal, the dream offers hope and the possibility of new futures.
When I’m working with materials, I select them for their ability to mimic or convey specific gestures. I like to think that the materials sustain a type of performance, and after the work is complete, it continues to hold a prolonged, sometimes stressed gesture.
My latest project has visually been about creating a blur and a gesture of searching through that blur. I’m somatically processing the content of my father’s narrative and the contextual histories, and while doing so, I’m locating tensions within my body that have absorbed these narratives. I then manipulate materials — folding, encasing and extending them into forms that reflect this repository of inherited experiences. Abstraction allows me to address the complexity of these tangled histories, which can’t be easily defined or categorized.
Your practice includes a mix of text, archival photos, and objects, but there’s still a level of opacity in your work. Can you speak to how opacity informs your material choices?
Ngô: We share a practice of thinking through the body and using abstraction to acknowledge fragmentation and complexity. In my archive-based projects, I’ve delved into surveillance practices of othered bodies, distilling them into objects that are often quite quiet and, as you say, opaque. The materials often reference the institutional apparatuses that they come from and the opacity both points to and upends the administrative, ethnographic and carceral gaze.
We’ve chatted about Édouard Glissant’s demand for “the right to opacity” and I believe this concept is operative in my work in revealing panopticism as a preoccupation in colonial ideology. Opacity is an act of resistance, but more fundamentally, a decolonial framework. It denies comprehensive objective knowledge, so essential to the enlightenment project on which coloniality is buttressed. It’s also relational, which I believe for both of our practices is an important way of being.
I know that your practice incorporates organizing with other artists. Can you elaborate on that and how it informs your making?
Garcia: I often think about what it means to be in opacity within aesthetics and discourse — it’s an active and somewhat elusive proposition. But being in conversation with other artists through community and collaboration can be a way of continuously interrogating it. I was just working on an exhibition together with another artist and writer around formal abstraction as a strategy for contending and healing intergenerational histories. We discussed the idea of “undoing” visibility rather than “resisting” it. Resisting implies reaction, while undoing suggests a choice that isn’t defined by opposition.
You would find me if you were trying, Kim Garcia, 2024. Photo by Matt Savitsky.
These conversations are the most exciting — they let us think out loud and actively reinterpret themes over time. I’m not one to exist in a silo, I always have several projects that are ongoing, and they create a generative structure that seeps into my art practice. Since 2018, I’ve been running this artist community called The Cold Read, which started off as a critique group that generated letters thinking about each other’s practice. It then evolved into a group that created prompt-based exhibitions, and now, its new iteration is interrogating how we use language in artist talks to speak alongside our work, both transparently and opaquely. Lately, I’ve been thinking about these group efforts as a type of alternative schooling that is lifelong and sustainable. I think part of being an artist is that you’re always searching and learning.
I know we’ve chatted before about how you also share a practice in collaboration and are part of a community with Asian American artists. Some of the topics you mentioned were about unpacking how Asian American artists are contextualized. Can you speak more about this and how these topics impact your work?
Ngô: Since 2010, I’ve collaborated with fellow Vietnamese-American artist Hồng-Ân Trương on a project that interrogates the foundations of U.S. immigration through its origins in laws of Chinese Exclusion. More largely, we’ve found that Asian American history — our labor, violence against us, or our political resistance — has been rendered invisible in U.S. culture and consciousness. Moreover, as artists with overlapping identities, we’re expected to take on a scarcity mindset and compete with one another over the same resources. I think my supportive relationships with other Asian artists has helped resist, or as you say, undo, some of these corrosive tendencies.
I am currently starting an audio interview series called Tiger Balm with fellow artist Maggie Wong. We are both recent transplants from Chicago and wanted to foster and grow the Asian artists community we had there. Similar to this interview, it will be a chance for Asian artists to be curious about one another and share in a way that hopefully feels like chatting over potluck!
AND, AND, AND — Stammering: An Interview, Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương, 2010 – present, Installation at MCA Chicago, 2020, photo by Nathan Keay.
Garcia: That sounds amazing! Audio interviews are definitely making a comeback, and among artists in LA, there’s a growing interest in creating more context around our practices. Conversations, panels and interviews between artists feel richer than traditional artist talks and offer a way to expand meaning and relationality. I think that’s why we’ve leaned toward a dialogue instead of a conventional interview.
Ngô: Yeah, I think it’s really important to acknowledge the ways that we are operating alongside, in dialogue, and in solidarity with one another. This is how we grow a healthier art ecosystem.
COVER ART, FROM LEFT:
Lost Time (5290.81 nF, 30k ohms), Hương Ngô, 2024, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, photo by Tom Van Eynde.
longing, Kim Garcia, 2024, photo by Matt Savitsky.
