Art Zine
Featuring Vietnamese Artists in America
Photo by Ashley Jaye Williams
2024 Art Zine
Vagabond’s first project is an art zine featuring 13 Vietnamese visual artists, musicians, poets and writers, mostly based in the DMV. The zine features artist interviews and photos. Each artist was also commissioned to write a letter to their younger selves as an act of self-love. The project culminated in a zine launch and outdoor exhibition featuring portraits of each artist exhibited in the Lost Origins outdoor Alley Gallery. The project was supported by Wherewithal Grants, a regional regranting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts administered by Washington Project for the Arts, and a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Vagabond is archived by the Library of Congress and The People’s Archive in Washington, DC.
Vagabond Zine Artists
Meet the 13 zine featured Vietnamese artists, poets, photographers, designers and musicians.
Artist
Anthony Trung Quang Le
“It’s liberation through self-love and vulnerability. There is an honesty there. There is an openness to be wrong there. There is a forgiveness there.”
Anthony Le
“For me, being Vietnamese American was almost about reducing myself when I was growing up. Now it feels expansive. I’m double things.”
Open MIC (Military Industrial Complex) (2023)
Artist
Antonius-Tin Bui
“How important is it for us to dive into the past, dive into archives, understand our histories but also dare to dream in new directions?”
Antonius-Tin Bui
“Maybe we should all just be funded by the government to be artists or have a starting salary as cultural workers. Maybe redistribute the money within the US military and weapons and arms <laugh>.”
return, my mirrored sister
Performed at Spring Hill Arts Gathering 2023 as part of “Slow and Sweaty”, a group exhibition envisioned by Claire Kim, The Here and There Collective’s curator.
Artist
Hien Kat Nguyen
“You don’t need a formal art education for art to speak to you because it will just speak to you. You just got to listen.”
Hien Kat Nguyen
“For me, it’s easier to have an artwork tell my story for me. I want to be understood, but I don’t want to just open up to anyone. I’m an open book, but people got to read.”
Who Owe the Vietnamese One Thousand One Hundred Twenty Years
Musician
Jess Nguyen
“How do we find the joy within our resilience to keep going?”
Jess Nguyen
“I want to break down what it means to be Vietnamese American without talking about the war because that’s not all we are, right?”
Lyric sheet collage
Artist
Khanh H. Le
“How can we leverage visual art, cinema, food or music to sort of bridge the gaps that allow communities to see each other?”
Khanh H. Le
“When the pointing fingers begin to lower, the other side can begin to reflect. When someone else becomes defensive, it’s harder for them to reflect.”
She Waited for the Rest of Her Family from this Point in Place
Artist
Kim Khouan Khong Sandara
“I think people are baffled when they see my temporary tattoos that are about the bombs in Laos, and then they see this cat drawing, and it’s both me.”
Kim Khouan Khong Sandara
“Things like this [zine] also make me feel more optimistic about the grand scheme of how everything is horrible, but we’re doing our little things in between to make it better, and that’s all we can do.”
Symmetry (or lack of), 2023
comedian
Leo Nguyen
“I always feel like comedy has a lot to do with contradictions. When you see these two things that should be aligned, but they are not.”
Leo Nguyen
“I always feel, more comfortable trying new things in Vietnam, compared to trying new things here. You get that added support of your people, your ancestors, your land.”
Musician
Mai Khoi
“When I start to make weird sounds with my voice, I feel something spiritual inside me. I think the most important thing in an artist’s life is to feel 100% freedom.”
Mai Khôi
“My motivation now is to create art about my life, social issues in Vietnam or here in America.”
Bad Activist performance at Playhaus (2024) | Photo by Anthony Le
Artist
Naomi Ngoc Le
“I don’t have to use sponges to clean my car. I will use it as an installation material. It’s like how I am as a person. I don’t have to be a dentist or an engineer. I can be an artist.”
Naomi Ngoc Le
“Some people would never think a woman could be as successful as Jeff Koons, but Jeff Koons is nowhere near Yayoi Kusama in terms of artistic practice.”
Spackle (2023)
Artist
Philippa Pham Hughes
“There is no one Vietnamese American experience, and doing all these interviews just proves that there’s so much diversity even within that category.”
PHILIPPA PHAM HUGES
“Social sculpture is creating space that allows for conversations and relationships to happen. The artwork cannot become complete until those conversations occur, until those relationships start to happen.”
Looking For America at the El Paso Museum of History (2019) |
Photo by Adam Ruben
Artist & POET
Thu Anh Nguyen
“What does it mean to be the daughter of a man who had the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen and who could draw anything beautifully, but never got to be an artist?”
Thu Anh Nguyen
“It’s the juxtaposition of saying something like ‘fuck the patriarchy’ and having really beautiful flowers next to it. Maybe your eye is drawn to the flowers, and then you’re reading the text and realize the significance.”
Made By Refugees
Artist & Graphic Designer
Uyen Hoang
“You open yourself up in the art, and people look at your psyche.”
Uyen Hoang
“I like stories that are more absurd. Have you read Franz Kafka? He’s my favorite author. It’s fiction like no one wakes up as a bug, right?”
Maggot’s Puberty
Photographer
Valerie Plesch
“I am proud that I am the granddaughter of Vietnamese refugees and of what they had to do to survive here and start all over again.”
Valerie Plesch
“There’s disappointment to how history keeps repeating itself, as we’ve seen in these places that America gets involved in with no real end game. I translate that fear, that anger, and disappointment to tell the stories of these people and what happened.”
Bans Off Our Bodies March in DC (2022)
VAGABOND
FEATURING VIETNAMESE ARTISTS
Vagabond Zine Team
Editor
Anthony Le
Anthony Le is a multidisciplinary artist and identifies as Vietnamese, American and Queer. They work in painting, printmaking, sculpture and fashion, exploring the joy of nonconformity. Le is a 2024 artist in residence at Playhaus. Le received a 2024 Wherewithal Grant by Washington Project for the Arts to create Vagabond, a zine about Vietnamese artists. They are a 2023 and 2024 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellow, and their work is in the DC Art Bank Collection. In 2023, Le presented their solo exhibition “Golden Looking Hour” at Transformer in Washington, DC.
Editor
Philippa Pham Hughes
Philippa Pham Hughes is a Social Sculptor, Cultural Strategist, Curator, Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, and Visiting Artist For Art & Civic Engagement at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. She applies relational thinking and an aesthetic of care and delight to her work in democracy building, civic engagement, and repairing the social fabric of our country one creative conversation at a time. Philippa draws from the arts and humanities to design spaces for honest conversations across political, social, and cultural differences. She has produced hundreds of creative activations since 2007 for people who might not normally meet to engage with one another in unconventional and meaningful ways. She also curates multi-disciplinary art exhibits & experiences.
Graphic Design
Uyen Hoang
Proofreader
Phượng-Duyên Hãi Nguyễn
Phượng-Duyên Hãi Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American textiles artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a teenager, Nguyễn’s experiences and perspective as an immigrant inform and enrich her work. She sews threadbare, abstract structures and forms. To Nguyễn, abstraction is a tool to process and articulate – a formal construct upon which she restructures her stories. It is an act of obscuring the painful details, distilling the most beautiful aspects, and transforming them into tangible objects.
She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2022 and her BA from the University of Virginia in 2015.
Grant Supported Project