SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first solo institutional exhibition of artist Diane Severin Nguyen featuring a newly commissioned video work. The exhibition is built around the new moving image work, co-commissioned by SculptureCenter and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and filmed in 2021. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances.
This dichotomy of the East and the West is further complicated by the significant Vietnamese diaspora currently living in Poland, composed of Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Southerners who came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. While such inherited divisions may be invisible to the majority culture in which they are situated, Nguyen traces how these layered inner conflicts are reckoned within the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime.
The exhibition is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator-at-Large, and is co-organized with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where it will be on view in spring 2022. The Chicago presentation is curated by Myriam Ben Salah, Director and Chief Curator. A publication – the artist’s first – will accompany the exhibition.
