Kvet Nguyen – Exploring Identity through Photography

23. 11. 2022

Kvet Nguyen, You are allowed to mix apples and pears here, 2020

How can one seek one's own identity through photography and how can one use the imperial photographic tool in a decolonial way? Through her work, photographer Kvet Nguyen explores the notion of belonging and the diasporic identity of the Slovak-Vietnamese community. The artist examines her family's migration, their integration into the Slovak environment, the concept of belonging and the nature of both collective and individual identity and memory.

Kvet Nguyen (born Hoa Nguyen Thi) is a Slovak-Vietnamese photographer. In her installation piece A memoryless, borderless and nameless space, 2019, Kvet seeks to represent memory and identity and explores the notion of diaspora as a community that is disconnected from its original roots. Due to the lack of objects that would represent her identity, the artist stages artefacts that create a kind of visual illusion and evoke the emotion of searching for her own identity. She extends the borders of flat photographic images into the realm of spatial installations, moving images or video, and even written text. Her series entitled You are allowed to mix apples and pears here, 2020, further explores the dual identity and hybridity of diasporic experience through observation of food.

Text has become particularly essential in her work Is the edge of the world a place from which to speak the world?, 2021, which takes the form of a photographic book. It contains autobiographical but also retrospective moments, especially from childhood – memories shared with Kvet by her parents. For the author, writing has become a very important tool for communication. It is also important in terms of belonging and collective memory; books by Vietnamese-American authors have been able to offer her a deeper picture of migration and her own identity through a shared diasporic experience. Kvet explains: “Thanks to them and others like Danh Vo, Ai Wei Wei, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen or Ocean Vuong, I was able to make up my own story.”

Another important theme that the author explores is otherness – it is related to her childhood, feelings of exclusion, the difficulties of integration and the trauma associated with it. She explored the topic in the photo installation piece Mutual Otherness, 2021. The work explores an anti-colonial vision of cross-cultural identities. In this project, Kvet collected conversations with people of diverse origins experiencing the novelty of the Slovak environment. Her work Reframing possibilities, 2020, searches for a way to use the photographic tool in a decolonial manner. Photography as “an imperial technology of extraction”, as described by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, is deconstructed by Kvet here to propose her own story and to connect with her family’s past. She explains: “The historical events that shaped me begin with the migration of my parents to Slovakia but continue back to the American War or French colonisation, which formed today’s Vietnam. Without these events, I would not be who I am. I identify with my national identity when we call it Slovak-Vietnamese.”

Text: Denisa Tomková

Image captions

1–4 | Kvet Nguyen, You are allowed to mix apples and pears here, 2020
5–9 | Kvet Nguyen, Mutual otherness, 2021

Denisa Tomková

PhD, is an art theorist and curator. She received her PhD in visual culture from the University of Aberdeen (UK) in 2019.

Kvet Nguyen

(Hoa Nguyen Thi) is slovak-vietnamese artist based in Bratislava. Cultural clash of two different realities is the basis for every thinking process and eventually the dominant subject in her works. She completed her master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava within she attended interns in Plymouth College of Art in England and the Royal Academy of Art in Netherlands. Her works have been exhibited in slovakian and international context (Soda Gallery, Čepan Gallery, OFF Festival, Nitra Gallery, Karlín Studios in Prague, Galeria Promocyjna, Krakow and at the presentation of photo books in Poznań (2017), and at LIVRE PARIS (2019) in France.

#43 Collecting

This edition departs from our series of thematic issues, as it is a celebration of the magazine’s twentieth birthday. As is usually the case with birthday celebrations (particularly such important ones), memories of the past intersect with the future. This is why this issue is dedicated to our activities and a summary of them, along with talents we believe in. In place of allotting the second part of the magazine to theory and current news, as in other issues, we decided to create a special edition on a topic that we have been discussing for years – now, the time has finally come to open it, grasp it fully, and thus change the art market in the Czech Republic. The topic at hand is collecting.