Hương Ngô facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Hương Ngô
Ngô in 2022
Born	Hong Kong
Nationality	American
Education	University of North Carolina
Years active	2004–present

Hương Ngô is an artist born in Hong Kong who now lives in Chicago, Illinois. She creates art that makes you think deeply. Her art often involves lots of research and can be shown as installations (art you can walk through), printmaking, or other unique ways.

Hương Ngô studied art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Today, she teaches art as an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Art Themes

Hương Ngô's art often explores important ideas like:

• Decoloniality: This means looking at how countries that were once colonies (ruled by another country) are still affected by that history, and how they can break free from those old ways of thinking.
• Intersectional feminism: This is about understanding how different parts of a person's identity, like their gender, race, or background, can combine to create unique experiences of unfairness or discrimination.
• Migration: This theme looks at the journeys people make when they move from one place to another, often to find a new home.

Her recent projects focus on the history of women who fought against colonial rule in French Indochina (which is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). For example, her project ESCAPE was a public performance. Other works explore how governments watch and control groups of people who are being treated unfairly.

Artworks and Exhibitions

In her exhibition To Name It Is to See It, at the DePaul Art Museum, Hương Ngô used special fabric. This fabric had patterns from a historical mural in a museum in Paris. She combined this with old documents from archives (places where historical records are kept). This artwork helped show the important role women played in the anti-colonial movement in French Indochina. It also highlighted how people were watched and controlled during these political movements.

One important person in Ngô's work is Nguyễn Thị Minh Khải (1910-1931). She was a Vietnamese revolutionary and a leader of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s. Art historians have written about how Ngô's art helps us understand the history and ideas around figures like Nguyễn Thị Minh Khải. They also note that Ngô's work in archives is like a "performance" where she tests ideas by translating old documents.

Hương Ngô also created a piece called The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility. The Opposite of Yellow is Not Gold. She made this with another artist, Hồng-Ân Trương. For this artwork, they used everyday photos of their mothers. They paired these photos with texts from US government hearings in the 1970s about Vietnamese refugees.

The artists explained that they looked for images of Vietnamese Americans in popular culture but found very few. So, they looked at their own family photo albums. They found pictures of their mothers working. They wanted to show the hard work their mothers did, especially since Asian Americans were not often seen in public records. They noticed a common way their families took photos. They paired pictures where their mothers' work was either hidden, made very obvious, or seemed invisible. This showed how their mothers were seen as successful refugees or loving caretakers.

Hương Ngô's art has been shown in many important places. These include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Prospect 5 Triennial in New Orleans, and the Prague Biennial. She has also exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Art Collections

Hương Ngô's artworks are part of the collections at several well-known institutions. These include the Museum of Modern Art, Smith College, the Walker Art Center, and the Center for Book Arts.

Awards

Hương Ngô has received several awards for her artistic achievements:

• Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, 2020
• 3Arts Next Level Award, 2020
• Camargo Core Fellow, 2018