From the post at artdaily.org concerning Pipo Nguyen-duy’s exhibition “AsSimulation”:
Pipo Nguyen-duy is a Vietnamese-American artist born in Hue, Vietnam, in 1962. At thirteen years of age, in 1975, he immigrated to the United States as a boat refugee. He was educated in the United States and eventually earned an MA in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1992, and an MFA in 1995. All of Nguyen-duy’s artworks grapple with the topic of his assimilation to Western culture.
From 1995 – 1998, Nguyen-duy worked on his series “AsSimulation”—what he describes as a tragic comedy dealing with race, sex, and gender with respect to cultural assimilation. These staged black-and-white self-portrait photographs utilize traditional Asian theatrical and visual language to imitate and interpret Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculpture. The final prints are displayed as an installation mimicking the museum tradition of exhibiting classical paintings in substantial frames with small metal plaques bearing the artwork’s title.
The artist states: “’AsSimulation’ uses the visual language of one culture to simulate that of another—an artistic assimilation analogous to the simulation in cultural assimilation. However, the self-conscious artifice serves only to highlight the artificiality inherent in the process of assimilation. ‘AsSimulation’ is thus an acknowledgement of a culturally ‘in-between’ place, where one belongs to both cultures, yet at the same time neither.”
Browse the exhibition “AsSimulation” at CLAMP
Browse all of Pipo Nguyen-duy’s work at CLAMP