Opening Reception:
October 9, 6 - 9 pm
Artist in Attendance

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‘I Was Born Where You Are’ is a collection of work that explores the ‘peri-human’ through orientalism/ornamentalism and its relationship to colonial history through oil painting, sculpture, and weaving.
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Paintings of select objects are coded under the western gaze to evoke a peri-human Southeast Asian woman. Porcelain, silk, delicate lotuses and other ornamental objects become alchemic attempts to evoke her presence and bring non-living objects to life.

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In symbiosis with these still lives, the idea of the swamp is explored as a site where death and life, like the peri-human subjects, exist simultaneously. The swamp is neither dead nor alive, but is home to a spectrum of both extremes, becoming a place where the lines dividing the past and future are blurred and undone. For the artist, it becomes a mirror to the self as a racialized other: a human subject turned into object; where under the western gaze is neither fully alive nor fully not-living.

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Sources

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Orientalism

“Orientalism” (1978), E.W. Said (Book)

‍Orientalism in Nineteenth Century Art 

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Chinoiserie

Chinoiserie 

“Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” 2025 Iris Moon (Exhibition & Catalogue)

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Ornamentalism

“Ornamentalism” (2018), A. A. Cheng (Essay and Book)

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Vietnamese/Southeast Asian & French Colonialism

“L’Art a Hue (1925)”, The Association of Friends of Ancient Hue (Book)

Indochina, ‘Greater France’ and the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris (Essay)

Community Without Borders: Symbolism, Theosophy, and Anti-Colonialism in France, 1880-1910 (Lecture)

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Fruits

“A Tale of Two Fruits: The Colonial History of Durian and Mangosteen” (2024), Thi Nguyen for The Saigoneer (Article)

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Born and raised in Toronto Canada, Phuong Nguyen is a Toronto based visual artist working in oil painting and sculpture. Nguyen uses these mediums to explore themes of Ornamentalism, Orientalism, and the relationship between personhood and objecthood by referencing Orientalist scholarship, and the aesthetics and history of Chinoiserie in relationship to South East Asian/Vietnamese femininity. Nguyen holds a BFA from OCAD University (2014).