"8 Artists Reflect on the American War in Vietnam, 50 Years On" — Alison Nguyen is interviewed by Emily Watlington for Art in America on her solo exhibition Perforation, Ellipse at Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Perforation, Ellipse is a multichannel video work mixing everything from direct painting on celluloid, to narrative passages, to cover songs performed on YouTube. Vietnamese bolero [also known as nhạc vàng, or “yellow music”] was the basis for my film Aisle 9 as well as my new work. In Vietnam people were put in jail for making these deeply sad love songs during and after the War, but 50 years later, it’s just all over the Internet. I’m drawn to these blips in history or in media where you can see how an object has changed over time in terms of its mythology and how it’s situated within culture.
The Storefront show also includes works with gold on aluminum featuring screen-printed handwritten scores and notes from Vietnamese Bolero composers. I really liked the idea of gilding documents from this genre that’s been intentionally left out of many archives and bringing them to an institution.
I tend to find myself probing deeper into these holes in history and into the archive, asking questions like: Where do censored materials ultimately end up? And where was the resistance to this censorship that may or may not have been recorded?
In Vietnam, there is a very strong culture of “if you know, you know.” The look of parts of Aisle 9 is based partly on a covert artist bar and a queer bar I visited on a 2020 trip. In Vietnam, you can’t gather [due to political regulation], so outside the building there was a tiny red light. When you walk in, it just looks like somebody’s living room, but the further inside you go you realize that there’s a sequestered bar and sprawling subculture in the back.
I don’t want to reject history; I want to create new ways of seeing and interpreting. Going deeper into history surrounding the war has made me more aware of living with ghosts—those of the past, the present, and future-past. —As told to Emily Watlington
Text courtesy Art in America.
Images: Alison Nguyen, Perforation, Ellipse, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2026 (installation view). Photographed by Dario Lasagni.
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Alison Nguyen: Perforation, Ellipse | Art in America
