At 5:00 AM on March 20, 2020, the artist Pipo Nguyen-duy got off a plane in Ho Chi Minh City and was escorted to a dormitory on Vietnam National University’s campus in the Thủ Đức district to begin a sixteen-day quarantine. Housed in an eighty-square-foot room, he lived with four men he had never met before, a circumstance shared with roughly a thousand others in the same situation on the floors above and below. Sneaking through the halls, Pipo photographed empty rooms—evacuated due to infection—and partial views through doors cracked open in the heat of the day, mapping the tension between public and private, being together and being alone. In these small rooms where people ate, slept, cleaned, and worked side-by-side, evidence of routine accumulated. Tending to their daily needs in such proximity, his fellow transients created familiarity among the unfamiliar and found a sense of home away from home—an intimacy Pipo recorded in these images.Indeed, Pipo’s photographic practice centers around home. Since fleeing Vietnam forty-eight years ago as a political refugee, the artist has spent his life in what he calls “no man’s land”—an experience characterized by an otherness that follows him wherever he goes. Working in both documentary and conceptual modes, Pipo turns the feeling of otherness projected onto him by borders, cultures, and languages into an expansion of what home can mean. East of Eden (2002–13), for example, consists of staged narrative photographs that document the physical history of the Vietnamese landscape, while AnOther Western (1994–98), the artist’s reinterpretation of nineteenth-century tintype portraits, contests tropes of race and gender in the context of cultural assimilation and the mythos of the American West. Similarly, Quarantine evokes a sense of place and belonging, articulating the desire we have as humans for somewhere to call home and the many ways we try to satisfy it, however unintentional, temporary, and paradoxical.—Greer Hobbs