Pipo Nguyen-duy

Sam Lee Gallery

@ Red Dot in Miami. Dec 6-9

Art Lmd. Profile. October 2007

Pipo Nguyen-duy’s large-scale color photographs of solitary figures adrift in lush, sometimes ravaged landscapes evoke our post-9/11 anxieties without any overt images of the Twin Towers or other icons from that tragic day. Instead, the artist-photographer places his figures in landscapes that could be anywhere in an effort to simultaneously examine and question the American frontier as a latter-day Eden. In photograph after photograph, the land becomes his personal metaphor for the human condition. Many of Nguyen-duy’s images imply ambiguous narratives triggered by the gestures of his mostly isolated figures who appear at odds with their surroundings. “It’s about the civilian and the humanity that exists in that particular anxious landscape,” says Nguyen-duy. “I think these aren’t specific landscapes, but they’re symbolic landscapes.”

The symbolic landscape found in Nguyen-duy’s piece The Mountain Fire features a young boy with his back to the camera, dwarfed by the magnitude of the surrounding environment. “I see my son in it, but at the same time I see myself,” Nguyen-duy says of the work. “I hope this work—even though it stems from an autobiographical impulse—by using other people, I hope the narrative can be more universal rather than the kind of identity-based, performative images.”

Likewise, the isolated figures populating such pieces as Nomad, Lazy Boy, and Butterfly also function as surrogates for the 45-year-old artist. “I don’t think these [works] are about catharsis,” Nguyen-duy explains. “It’s more about telling stories that I never had a chance to tell. After September 11, I remember just thinking to myself how to my students and my children, friends of mine who are living in this culture—that particular day marks [how things] will never be the same again. We will be living in a time of war.”

Although the work doesn’t have any overt wartime iconography, the artist says many of his images are loosely inspired by his experiences growing up in Vietnam during the war. The artist immigrated to the United States as a 13-year-old refugee in 1975, days before the fall of Saigon. But it wasn’t until Nguyen-duy was in his 30s that he began to make art. He earned a Master of Arts degree in photography in 1992 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1995, both from Albuquerque’s University of New Mexico.

Like in life, Nguyen-duy’s art shows death co-existing with the possibilities for renewal. This is especially evident in his ongoing series The Garden, which documents abandoned greenhouses near Oberlin, Ohio, where he is an assistant professor for photography at Oberlin College. (The rest of the year he lives in Oregon.) More grounded in the documentary tradition than his earlier photographs, The Garden unfolds from the vantage point of the artist as an objective witness, studying these sites littered with modern-day artifacts with a Zen-like air of detachment. The weed-filled enclosures in these photographs erupt with monochromatic color, as if nature has reclaimed these small pockets of civilization.

However, the cryptic titles of the works making up The Garden eliminate any temptation to search for a narrative thread. Here, the images emphasize formal elements like the quality of light washing over the various discarded objects in these abandoned sites. “I think The Garden is about [asking] how do you remove the photographer as much as possible,” says Nguyen-duy, who briefly lived as a Buddhist monk in Northern India during the 1980s, “so that the beauty and drama of that place can actually play out in front of that objective lens.”

Pipo Nguyen-duy’s recent exhibition, “East of Eden,” could be seen at Sam Lee Gallery through October 20 at 990 N. Hill Street #190, in Los Angeles; (323) 227-0275 or www.samleegallery.com

Oct 2007 by neil kendricks

Art Lmd.

ArtForum, Critic's Pick

Pipo Nguyen-duy

SAM LEE GALLERY
990 N. Hill Street #190, 
September 8–October 20

Pipo Nguyen-duy’s sweeping photographic series “East of Eden,” 2002–, registers the complex psychological and political anxieties affecting American communities. The rich colors and idealized beauty of Nguyen-duy’s landscapes are inspired in part by Hudson River School paintings, but each is distinguished by an unlikely intrusion: a marching band pauses in the forest, a shopping cart rests on the snow. In Ring Around, 2004, the Crayola-bright colors of children’s clothing pop beneath a leaden sky like colorful bits of refuse, but the children’s faces, and most of their bodies, are obscured by long, tramped-on grasses. The mysterious and potentially nightmarish luminosity that characterizes this image pervades Nguyen-duy’s works, giving them an otherworldly sensibility. Like other artists who stage their seemingly naturalistic photographs, such as Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, Nguyen-duy dramatizes the everyday. Like the uneasiness he explores, all but the most surreal alterations are difficult to pinpoint, barely grazing the surface of each environment. Nguyen-duy was raised in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen; this series draws on memories of childhood in a war-torn country as reflected by and refracted through the current climate of uncertainty.

Nguyen-duy was raised in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen; this series draws on memories of childhood in a war-torn country as reflected by and refracted through the current climate of uncertainty.

—Annie Buckle

A tension from innocence lost, Leah Ollman. Los Angeles Times Sept.11/ 2007

The tension in Pipo Nguyen-duy's photographs is a subtle thing. Battle armor doesn't clang and clash; storm clouds don't erupt with violent force. Instead, the pictures exude a stability that seems to be eroding from the inside out.In the dozen stirring images at the Sam Lee Gallery, Pipo creates a strong sense of place only to use it as a setting for small dramas of displacement. Within the expansive beauty of the North American landscape, he conveys the predicament of feeling adrift -- without tools, means or direction.Members of a marching band, bedecked in red and white, pause solemnly beside a creek, leaning against tree trunks or sitting on fallen logs. The leafless forest behind them seems miles from any parade. In another picture, a stuffed recliner settles surreally into the shallow waters of a pond. "Nomad" features a young man standing resignedly in a murky stream, a suitcase half-immersed nearby, luminous woods spreading around him in unacknowledged splendor.Pipo's pictures read as allegorical tableaux, slightly stilted scenes orchestrated to emblematize a particular condition. The Vietnamese-born photographer, a refugee at 13 and now a professor at Oberlin College, started this "East of Eden" series in the summer after Sept. 11, 2001.

Even when showing camouflaged snipers skulking in the woods and fencers oddly rehearsing in a snowy clearing, his compositions are keyed to loss and trauma. What have been lost in the making of this new "landscape of anxiety," as the artist calls it, are innocence, purity, an abiding sense of security, the same things he lost as a child living through the Vietnam War. This nation's surfaces still appear intact -- and in the case of the natural landscape, awesome even -- but its soul is most definitely in trouble.

"Sound Exchange" Goes to Sam Lee Gallery

For immediate release:

Los Angeles, CA - This Friday, September 21, 12 noon-12:30PM, Sound Exchange goes to Chinatown for a visit to two new galleries during the opening receptions for their latest exhibitions. Director Sam Lee, of Sam Lee Gallery at 990 North Hill Street #190, introduces us to artist Pipo-Nguyen-duy, a photographer born in Viet-Nam, now living in Oregon and working and teaching at Oberlin College, Ohio. We talk with him about his series on view "East of Eden" which explores within "staged, large-scale, color photographs, the displacement of humanity within a post-apocalyptic North American landscape." 

Join Jay Kugelman and co-host Loretta Ayeroff for a Sound Exchange walk+talk through two Chinatown galleries, this Friday, September 21, 

12 noon-12:30PM on KPFK Pacifica Radio, 90.7FM.

This program will be archived for three months on www.kpfk.org.