Phung Huynh

Phung Huynh (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator with a practice in drawing, painting, public art, and community engagement. Her work explores cultural perception and representation. Huynh challenges beauty standards by constructing images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery to unpack how contemporary cosmetic surgery can whitewash cultural and racial identity. Her work of drawings and prints on pink donut boxes explores the complexities of assimilation and cultural negotiation among Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who have resettled in the United States. Huynh’s most recent work addresses the repatriation of looted Cambodian statues in the context of challenging the legacy of colonialism, unethical museum practices, and the refugee’s desire to return home. Phung Huynh has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including spaces such as the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has also completed public art commissions for the Metro Orange Line, Metro Silver Line, the Los Angeles Zoo, and the Los Angeles General Medical Center through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. Phung Huynh is Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Los Angeles where her focus is on serving disproportionately impacted students. She has served as Chair of the Public Art Commission for the city of South Pasadena and Chair of the Prison Arts Collective Advisory Council, which supports arts programming in California state prisons. She served on the Board of Directors for LA Más, a non-profit organization that serves BIPOC working class immigrant communities in Northeast Los Angeles. Huynh completed undergraduate coursework at the University of Southern California, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with distinction from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University. She is a recipient of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the California Arts Council Individual Established Artist Fellowship, the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, and the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award. Phung Huynh is Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Los Angeles, and she is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

@phungxion | www.phunghuynh.com/

Work Description

My father is from Cambodia where the Khmer Empire (c. 802 – 1431) birthed magnificent temples that still stand today. The art of that period rests in the heart of Cambodian arts and culture. However, the carpet bombing of Cambodia during President Nixon’s administration and the American War in Vietnam opened the floodgates for the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s which eliminated 90% of artists and shattered the cultural landscape of Cambodia and those living in diaspora. Considering the profound impact of war, genocide, and American imperialism, my artwork is built on the desire to return home that focuses on the repatriation of ancestral art and heritage to Cambodia. The return home examines stolen ancient Cambodian sculptures that memorialize the Golden Age of Khmer culture from the 9th – 15th centuries, and particularly the sculptures of looted Khmer Buddha statue heads that are currently housed in American and European art museums with the disconnected, decapitated statues of their bodies in the temples of Cambodia.

The Buddha head as a decorative item, garden motif, candle, commodified object is pervasive and normalized which is rooted in violence and the many Buddha statue heads on museum walls, pedestals, and in vaults. These heads were forcefully removed from their original bodies, stolen and illegally placed in museums and private collections outside their places of origin. As a daughter of a Cambodian father who survived war and genocide of the 1970s, I am well aware of how Cambodia became a vulnerable place for destruction and the theft of so many of our statues that are essentially vessels for our divine, ancestors, and cultural heritage. The looting of Khmer statues from sacred temple sites began when France colonized Cambodia in the late 19th century. The rise of looting of the statues followed when American troops came to Southeast Asia during the American War in Vietnam, and the height of the looting occurred in the 1970s through 1990s by looters (mostly former Khmer Rouge soldiers) who were hiding in secluded jungles and desperate to stay alive. Recent press coverage on this topic centered on Douglas Latchford, a British art dealer who made over $260 million in stolen statues and sculptures that were smuggled from Cambodia to Thailand and then eventually placed in American and European museums and private collections.

The current body of work includes seven drawings of Khmer statue heads that are referenced from several American museum collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), the USC Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena, CA), and more. These statue heads are stripped of their sacredness and individual sanctity with labels that do not identify them, but position them in anonymity and erasure with catalog numbers and names such as Head of Buddha, Deity, Head of a Deity, Head of a Door Guardian, Head of a deity with a tall headdress, Head of a Divine Being. The drawings are framed in ornate gold molding similar to that of museums, and across from these drawings is an installation of printed images taken from photographs I took of Khmer statues without their heads when I visited sacred temple sites in Cambodia. So many decapitated and dismembered statues of Buddha, Lakshmi, and guardians at Angkor Tom, Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, Banteay Srei, and Pre Rup sat in dark silent corridors and niches. The statue of Lakshmi at Angkor Wat had no head but was adorned with a glittering golden sampot, while the toes of a monumental statue of Vishnu was broken off and made into amulets. The images of the statue bodies are printed on a translucent fabric to create an eerie, apparition-like experience, and a ritualistic performance by Classical Cambodian dancers will make the bodies whole and activate the space to contrast how such statues are taken out of their cultural and spiritual context when they are in museums.

Being a refugee is entangled in the fallacy of the American Dream which veils the experience of being uprooted, displaced, and erased amid diaspora. UNESCO (The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recognizes Khmer art as vital to humanity, and there is currently a burgeoning Khmer “renaissance” movement. A radical future frames a movement that includes the diaspora where refugees can return home. There is the heartache of longing for belonging as we try to locate new homelands because we cannot return to where we were born. It is my hope that I can make work about a future in which refugees can return and participate in the rebirth of arts and culture after war and surviving genocide.

Angkor Thom Guardian Statue 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Angkor Wat Lakshmi Statue 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Angkor Wat Naga Buddha Statue 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Angkor Wat Naga Buddha Statue with Jasmines 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Jayavarman VII 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Ta Prohm Naga Buddha Statue 2023, 2024
print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Angkor Wat Small Naga Buddha Statue 2023, 2024
print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Ta Prohm Naga Buddha Statue 2023, 2024
Print on poly sheer fabric
8 x 3 feet

Artist Interview

Can you tell us about your artistic practice and the major influences that have affected your work?

I am a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice is shaped by my Southeast Asian refugee experience. My father is a genocide survivor from Cambodia, and my mother and I were born in Vietnam. As a family, we survived war violence, the harrowing journey of forced migration, and living in refugee camps. Growing up in immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles, I came of age in communities where locating identity was in constant flux. My current work is informed by my experience as a refugee of Cambodian and Chinese descent from Vietnam.

Can you describe your creative process through the use of materials?

Inspired by my family’s migration story, personal research, and interviews with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, I make drawings and prints on pink donut boxes and cross-stitches images of personalized California license plates with unanglicized names. My work unpacks the complexities of diaspora, immigration, displacement, and assimilation. Each drawing or cross-stitched piece is meant to be a sensitive portrayal of a unique personal story. Close to 90% of California’s donut shops are mom-and-pop businesses run by Cambodian immigrants or Cambodian Americans (Khmericans). The trend that links pink boxes with donuts can be traced back to the Khmerican donut ecosystem. I am also an artist who engages in social practice and have completed public art commissions and facilitated community events and workshops.

How do you feel about the notion of cultural memory and creating/re-telling forms of personal history through your work?

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the Khmer Rouge takeover, and Southeast Asian resettlement caused by war and U.S. imperialism. Fifty years ago, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in April and instituted a devastating genocide. Cambodian New Year always lands in April, and every year, Cambodians at home and in the diaspora must celebrate and mourn. To balance grief as well as joy and hope for the new year is connected to the complicated and difficult task of an artist who understands the urgency to preserve a history and culture that were almost erased, and at the same time, create something that propels us forward into the future.

My father is from Cambodia and left his home country because of civil war, genocide, and Pol Pot’s brutal dictatorship. He bicycled to the border between Cambodia and Vietnam and briefly remade a life in Vietnam. Within three years, my father met and married my mother, had me, and brought our immediate and extended families to a refugee camp in Thailand by pretending to be a fisherman and hiding forty-one family members under the boat’s deck. We eventually resettled in Michigan in December of 1978 and then moved to Los Angeles in 1981.

We were the first Southeast Asian family to live in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. In the late 1970s David and Karen Jorgenson were professors at Central Michigan University who decided to sponsor my family to come to the United States. The Vietnam War and Nixon’s secret carpet bombing of Cambodia killed and displaced countless of Southeast Asians. The Jorgensons, now my godparents, saw their friends being drafted to join a war they protested, and their act of resistance was an act of love, the decision to sponsor a family from Vietnam and Cambodia. When I asked my godmother, Karen how she decided to sponsor our family, she said that she was worried no one would help such a large family. We were a family of eight. Years ago, Karen recounted in a letter to our family about the day she met us:

Before we picked you up at the airport, we had heard that Southeast Asians did not like to be hugged. Apparently, though, you had heard that Americans like to hug. So, you tried to hug us, and we tried not to hug you.”

The pink donut box has become an icon for the Cambodian American experience since most donut shops are owned by Cambodian refugees and immigrants in California and in other parts of the United States. In preparing for a new series of donut box drawings that reflect on the 50th anniversary of the wars fought in Southeast Asia, I went through my family’s archives of photographs and newspaper articles that documented the early years of our resettlement. I found an article from Central Michigan Life, a student-run newspaper from Central Michigan University that quoted my godfather, Dave who said:

We owe the people of Southeast Asia a lot. I hold us personally responsible for a lot of the stuff that’s gone on.”

In an intimate conversation about our sponsorship, I asked my godmother, Karen what he meant. After a period of heavy silence, she shared that when my godfather was a graduate student in Geology, he and other graduate students were given an assignment to map out Vietnam. Years later, they discovered that the assignment was used by U.S. military to bomb Vietnam. To this day, there are still an unknown number of land mines that were planted in Cambodia and Vietnam over fifty years ago. More than fifty years later, the land mines are accidently detonated by innocent residents who end up losing limbs or die, including young children playing in the fields.

The legacy of war trauma and genocide followed us here to the United States with unrelenting, gripping consequences that take on the form of PTSD, inherited trauma, assimilation, cultural erasure, gang violence, incarceration, and deportation. The new series of pink donut box drawings present very personal and intimate experiences from my family archives which include my father translating to Cambodian refugees who just arrived in Michigan, my godparents and parents posing for a photograph, and my green card that I had to relinquish when I became a naturalized citizen. I also wanted to complicate the American historical narrative by including portraits of contemporary Cambodian American refugee educators, writers, artists, organizers, and resisters who disrupt the telling of our story from authors who did not live our Southeast Asian refugee experience. The new work critically considers this experience as a lens to see how the United States continue to incite, fund, and participate in wars today. I never knew a world without war, and I have never met a person who has not lived through one.