Across The Ocean by Hien Hoàng at Mucho Mas!

EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival in collaboration with Mucho Mas! is pleased to present Across the Ocean, the solo exhibition by Hien Hoàng, a Vietnamese multimedia artist based in Germany.

Overview

Hoàng's work explores social values and the transformation of materials through photography, installation, performance, film, and sculpture.

The installation Across The Ocean contains parts of the interdisciplinary project Asia Bistro - Made in Rice, which uses rice, a symbol of the "Asian" concept in the West, to address the underlying discrimination of the "model immigrant." Food becomes a metaphor for stereotypes about Asian cultures: a boundary, a mask. Artifacts collected and memories of discrimination from Hoàng's relatives form the basis for the images, movements, and performances.

This work aims to contribute to the discussion on immigration policy in Europe and how it causes traumas – both personal and collective. The tableaux presented play on the Orientalist desire to consume exotic cultures. The thirst to experience the unknown, but in a palatable form for a globalized audience. The convenient coexistence between the popularity of "Asian food" and the fetishization of Asian women's bodies. Considering culture as a packaged commodity, Hoàng comments on the homogenization imposed on very diverse communities, brought together under a single diasporic identity.

Playing with distortion, she uses deformity as a metaphor for the deformation of identity. Dividing the image to mark the distance between the perception we have of ourselves in Western culture and the image we have of ourselves in the world; the attribution of terms like "people of color" or "Asians" when we exist in the diaspora. Despite being suffocated by this identity weight, the ideal immigrant must learn to smile. By constructing a counter-image to popular clichés, Hoàng enacts a performative refusal of identity pigeonholing.