Performing Vietnamerica
50 Years after the War
Special guests
Ly Hoàng Ly and Việt Lê
Symposium Schedule
117 Wilson Hall
12:00 Welcome and lunch
Opening Remarks by Sylvia Chong
Session 1: Environmentalism in Vietnam
12:15 Spencer Phillips on Environmental Progress/Challenges in Vietnam
12:30 Film screening
Ly Hoàng Ly, ‘hope-memory’ tree, 2018-2023 (27:00)
1:00 Q&A with Ly Hoàng Ly and Spencer Philips, moderated by Conrad Cheung
Session 2: Gender and Sexuality in Vietnam and the U.S.
1:30 Hương Ngo on Feminist and LGBTQ movements in Vietnam
1:45 Film screening
Việt Lê, namaste, 2024 (3:12)
Việt Lê, đến đền den, 2024 (2:45)
Việt Lê, Lộc Vàng, 2024 (14:56)
2:05 Q&A with Việt Lê and Hương Ngo, moderated by Conrad Cheung
2:35 Coffee Break – reconvene in 142 Wilson
Session 3: Refugee and Diasporic Futures
142 Wilson Hall
2:45 Isabel Felix Gonzales on Asian diasporic women’s art post-Stop Asian Hate
3:00 Film screening
Patricia Nguyen, collapse to expand, 2023 (7:40)
3:10 Q&A with Isabel Felix Gonzales and Patricia Nguyen, moderated by Sylvia Chong
3:40 Closing remarks
4:00 reception / dinner in Wilson Hall 1st floor lobby
thương
Ly Hoàng Ly and Việt Lê | 2 person solo show
6-7 pm in UVA Chapel
About the artists:
Ly Hoàng Ly
Ly Hoàng Ly, currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, is a multidisciplinary artist working across poetry, painting, video, performance art, artist’s book, installation and public art. Ly received a Fulbright Scholarship and earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), majoring in Sculpture in 2013. She spent a year from 2013 to 2014 interning at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection (JFABC, SAIC). She also works as a book editor of Youth Publishing House in Ho Chi Minh City since 2000. Ly is the first woman visual artist in Vietnam practicing performance art and poetry performance. Her installations incorporate a level of performance or activation between subjects and objects that unlock sensual affects in the human-materiality nexus.
Việt Lê
Việt Lê’s creative and critical practice as a queer, disabled artist focuses on sexualities, spiritualities—the physical and the metaphysical. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021, which received the 2023 Outstanding Book Award in Media and Visual Culture from the Association of Asian American Studies), and collaborated with Latipa on the art book White Gaze (Sming Sming Books | Candor Art, 2019), which is in the collection of museums internationally including the Guggenheim, Victoria and Albert Museum, SF MOMA, and in over 200 libraries. Việt Lê is Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts (former Chair, Visual & Critical Studies graduate program). They are a 2022-24 Headlands Bay Area Fellow and ‘22 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow. Lê has presented their work at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; DoBaeBacSa Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Sàn Art, Việt Nam; 1a Space, Hong Kong; Bangkok Art & Cultural Center (BACC), Thailand; Civitella Ranieri, Italy; Shanghai Biennale, China; Rio Gay Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; among other venues.
Patricia Nguyen
Patricia Nguyen is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She is currently an Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Virginia, and earned her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research and performance work examines critical refugee studies, political economy, forced migration, oral histories, inherited trauma, torture, and nation building in the United States and Vietnam. Dr. Nguyen has over 20 years experience working in arts education, community development, and human rights in the United States and Vietnam. As a performance artist, she has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Jane Addams Hull House, Oberlin College, Northwestern University, U. of Massachusetts Boston, Links Hall, Prague Quadrennial, Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Contemporary Arts Network. She is co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community centered art, food, and design studio based in Uptown, Chicago. In recent news, she is an award-winning designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, part of a historic reparations ordinance.
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UVA Faculty Bios:
Conrad Cheung is Assistant Professor of Art and affiliate faculty in the Environmental Thought and Practice program. They work on critical interventions in public commons to make space for renewed political agency, epistemic disobedience, and interspecies care.
Sylvia Chong is Associate Professor of American Studies and English and the director of the Asian Pacific American Studies minor. She is the author of The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (2012), and is currently writing a history of cinematic yellowface.
Isabel Felix Gonzales is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Their visual and written work examines the political and aesthetic cultures of the early 21st century, and the places and people who exceed racial, sexual, gendered, and national forms of normative “belonging.”
Hương Ngo is co-director of UVA in Việt Nam, and co-founder of the Hà Nội-based Center for Development and Integration.
Spencer Phillips is Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Program Director for UVA in Việt Nam, and founder of Key-Log Economics. His work brings information about the economic value of environmental protection to public policy making.