For this artist talk Nam Phi Dang will discuss his ongoing series Somewhere Else (2015 - 2018), which consists of photographs the artist has taken on past trips to his family’s home country of Vietnam. The imagery explores the artists’ complicated and ambivalent notions of, and desires for, home. For this vitrine exhibition, Dang’s photographs are, for the first time, shown adjacent to objects from his mother’s archive. Of particular interest are his mother’s journals, photo albums, loose photographs, identity cards, and a worn yearbook from the 1970s. They depict her youth in Vietnam, and her time living as a refugee in Hong Kong and the Philippines in the late 1980s before moving to Canada. Also on view is a new video work that brings together audio from a recent interview the artist conducted with his mother, paired with digitized VHS footage of his family's trip to Hanoi in 1998. This was the artists' first time in his family's country and his mother's first return.
