Pipo Nguyen-duy “Hotel Window”

ClampArt

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ClampArt presents “Hotel Window,” Pipo Nguyen-duy’s newest body of work. The exhibition coincides with “(My) East of Eden,” an earlier series presented in the gallery’s main space.

Pipo Nguyen-duy moved to the United States in 1975 as a Vietnamese refugee. Consequently, cultural identity and cultural authenticity are ongoing themes in all of his artwork. The artist writes: “[S]ite-specificity has been an integral part of my studio practice, as I always consider geographical, historical, and cultural significance of the locations in my research.”

For “Hotel Window,” Nguyen-duy rented the same sixty-four square-foot room in Ho Chi Minh City, District 1, over the course of several trips to Vietnam from 2015 to 2017. For close to six months he photographed obsessively from dawn until deep into the night, breaking only for food and sleep. The alley below the hotel serves as a shortcut between a congested street where it begins and a crowded market where it terminates on the other end. The artist’s lens sat witness to all of the human traffic and adventures that unfolded before its steady gaze.

“With this work, I aim to document, as if from the perspective of a natural scientist or archeologist. Using the camera to record facts rather than regarding it as a subjective tool, I have become increasingly intrigued with the idea of mapping my ‘own’ culture in hopes of understanding it from an outsider’s point of view using the hotel room as a metaphor for an in-between place. The window curtain was the variable that changed, in addition to the light, which also varied throughout the day.

“The project began as a survey to categorize different types of people, record gestures and behavior, map traffic patterns, and capture ‘decisive’ moments of street scenes below. Conceptually, I intended this mapping project only to reveal my difficulties of defining home—however as the project grew, the complexities of the images also have become more layered.”