Inheritance at West Space, Melbourne interrogates the idea of ‘home’ for second-generation migrants
For second-generation migrants the idea of ‘home’ is complex. There is the everyday physical household with its predictable daily rhythms and then its twin, one that is built from the repetition of elders’ stories and shoebox collections of seemingly mundane objects, all of which is stitched together by imagination to recreate a version of a distant ancestral home.
Phuong Ngo’s Inheritance, which consists of a series of videos, personal items, photographs and inherited objects, reflects on the desire of the descendants of migrants to match the reality of their origins with how they imagine it. Ngo was born in Adelaide to parents who fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War in 1981, and which saw over 94,000 Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese refugees settled in Australia, and this exhibition is anchored by Ngo’s first trip to Vietnam in 1996. As a twelve-year-old with a cheap windup camera, he snapped disparate shots as he tried to make sense of the familiar-but-unfamiliar site of his family’s home in Mỹ Xuyên, a town near the mouth of the Mekong River.
Twenty-nine years later, and guided by the perspective of his twelve-year-old-self, Ngo’s fascination with the ancestral family home persists. As with previous exhibitions Ngo attends to the interior of that home, with a focus on the family table (as well as other cabinetry) brought by his parents from Vietnam. His family table, with turned wooden legs that hold a marble top – the style unremarkable for its ubiquitousness in the Southeast Asian home – appears here in deconstructed form with the wooden base resting on its marble top. Devoid of function, the table now serves as a metaphor of Ngo’s attempt to trace the past through the act of deconstruction and reconstruction.
Accompanying the original table is a series of new tables that appear as if similarly unfinished; their wooden bases, placed across the exhibition space, stand exposed while their marble tops are stacked against one another on an A-frame. In this state the wooden forms invite new appreciation for the artisanal craftmanship and the act of construction. These new tables are made from wood that Ngo’s family helped him salvage from the house in Mỹ Xuyên while it was being destroyed in 2016. Here Ngo has crafted them into ‘descendants’ of the original table by copying the details of the original; the soon-to-be-completed tables are intended to be gifts for his nieces and nephews once the show closes.
Protruding from the centre of each table base is a beam from the ancestral house, to which video screens are strapped; each screen plays a short video that records Ngo and his family using objects that have journeyed with them from Vietnam to Australia: redundant French-Indochina coins are used for medicinal cleansing and divination, while family jade is pressed by Ngo’s mother through his newly pierced ears.
Placed, almost hidden, around the exhibition are a few objects that require visitors to step closer and examine. These bowls, coins and photographs, the kinds of ephemera that might be stored in a shoebox for safekeeping, evoke the sense of intrigue that tracing one’s family history can conjure. A photograph of the ancestral home nestled into a cupboard door is one Ngo took in 1996 during that first visit to Mỹ Xuyên.
Soft light filters through a layered curtain of mosquito netting, which is dyed with pigments created from the wood of the artist’s ancestral home, and which spans the length of the windows. It feels as though the netting envelopes the exhibition, creating a protected space within which Ngo is able to both preserve family tradition and construct it anew.
Inheritance at West Space, Melbourne, through 7 June
