Make it Home

About The Exhibition

Make it Home investigates the multiplicities of the ways “home” is defined, then understood. The gallery brings together the work of multigenerational artists Ann Lê, Hùng Việt Nguyễn, and Thịnh Nguyễn across photographs, textiles, mixed media, paintings, and conceptual interventions to look at how “home” is continually reassembled, reimagined, and retold, shaped by the people and life practices we choose to carry on.

The lowercase “it” in Make it Home is intentional. As a pronoun, “it” is less an object than a question: what is being made home?

Ann Lê’s Home: Faux Family Photo Album collages together what home is thought to be with the family that comes to shape what home truly becomes. Lê scans old family portraits of her relatives in Vietnam and pairs them with photographs of homes throughout Los Angeles, creating a fabricated family album that brings people and places separated by distance into the same frame. These portraits become a diasporic object, asking what came before and what’s to follow, and what we inherit from places we may not have personally known.

Hùng Việt Nguyễn’s paintings emerge from his longstanding relationship with nature, which he describes as a kind of pilgrimage, a way of finding stillness and reconnecting with something beyond himself. In select works on view, figures turn toward the moon, with water appearing as a recurring passage through the landscape, suggesting a search for somewhere beyond what is immediately known. A depiction of Aokigahara, Japan’s “Sea of Trees,” introduces a different kind of passage: tents remain pitched in a place where their occupants never return. Nguyễn’s worlds guide viewers through a gateway of possibilities, asking: what if what we envisioned the future to look like is exactly what we see now?

Thịnh Nguyễn’s illustrations move between the familiar and the otherworldly, carrying forward the sense of wonder that began with his childhood observations of the world around him. Alongside them, Return to Tây Ninh translates memories of the southern Vietnamese countryside into layered textile patterns, each abstracting a part of the final landscape painting. An original gouache painting is displayed above the textiles, revealing the care behind their making. Draped across quilt racks, the textiles take on a domestic presence, with the final image placed lower and visible only upon approach, bringing a remembered place into the place we call home.

For curator An Lê, the exhibition is guided by a question: “make it home” can mean reaching a destination, but what happens when there is no singular place to return to? For the Vietnamese diaspora, home is both inherited and made in the places where we build new lives. Perhaps we do not find home so much as recognize it in what we have made together.

Curator Brenda Huỳnh begins with how home can be thought of as a physical space, a space that we come home to. However, how can home be redefined with the Vietnamese diaspora spread across the world, how is home therefore created and preserved? She turns to thinking about the objects and spaces that bring me closer to a definition of home. Through this exhibition, she encourages viewers to think about what objects stirred up the thought of home; thinking about how to think about where these objects or life conditions come from equates to making it home. 

Together, these artists reveal home as something less permanent than we might imagine. It can be photographed, reconstructed, carried, remembered, and remade. It can exist in a house, but also in a family, an object, a pattern, a memory, or a possibility. As you move through the exhibition, we invite you to consider the objects, relationships, places, memories, and conditions that shape your own understanding of home; to ask not only where home is, but how you Make it Home.      

About The Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association

VAALA was founded in 1991 by a group of Vietnamese American journalists, artists, and friends to fill a void in the community and provide a space for newly resettled immigrant artists to express themselves. VAALA’s mission is to connect and enrich communities through Vietnamese art and culture. Historically run entirely by volunteers, VAALA is a community-based non-profit organization. Over the years, VAALA has collaborated with diverse community partners to organize numerous cultural and artistic events. VAALA’s four core programs include the annual Viet Film Fest, Viet Book Fest, multi-art exhibitions, and Gallery Beyond Walls, featuring free art workshops for youth and community members.

Please visit www.vaala.org and @vaalacommunity on IG for more information.