First Friday: 'Bảo Ơi', Hùng Lê

Each year, the Four Chapter Gallery partners with the Kansas City Art Institute Fiber Department to present the work of an outstanding graduating senior.

This year, we are excited to invite you to view the work of Hùng Lê, a Vietnamese-American artist. In his exhibit, Bảo Ơi, the artist considers the liminal space he occupies as an inheritor of two counties. Utilizing fabric, photographs, and found objects in combination with laser engraving and woodworking, Lê excavates memory and history to better understand himself and provide a methodology to help him navigate through larger cultural ideas and established structures such as society or family.

__

“I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words. I also count myself among those Americans who often do not know what to make of Vietnam and want to know what to make of it. Americans, as well as many people the world over, tend to mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor, or dishonor as the case may be. This confusion has no doubt led to some of my own uncertainty about what it means to be a man with two countries, as well as the inheritor of two revolutions.”   – Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War