Hương Ngô to unveil “Ungrafting” at Fine Arts Center
The Fine Arts Center will be welcoming the new exhibition “Ungrafting” on Friday, featuring the art of Huong Ngô.
The exhibition, set in the museum’s El Pomar Galleries, will be Ngô’s first solo showing in Colorado.” Ungrafting” will provide a look into how the natural world can serve as an archive of colonial history using photographs from the early 20th century of foreign trees and tree grafts planted in Indochina by the French.
“My project is kind of combining the work that I’ve been doing around history and nature — history, especially around colonization and immigration, but now combining it with my first love, which was science,” she said.
The concept of the exhibition came to Ngô while working in the National Archives in Vietnam, where she stumbled upon photos of individuals next to trees and foreign plants.
“There were labels that were describing the plant, but just no acknowledgement of the human in the photograph,” she said. “That kind of sent me on this thread of research around the connection between colonial conquest and ecological projects, how we think about the environment and nature, and how that manifests in our the landscape around us.”
From there, Ngô reproduced the photographs using the Van Dyke process, which will make the images gradually deteriorate and fade.
“Thinking about those photographs, I wanted to show them, but I wanted them to have their own life and be unstable and have a possibility of kind of disappearing over time,” she said.
Some photos capture tree grafting, a technique where tissues of plants are joined so as to continue their growth together, which Ngô uses as a metaphor for colonialism.
“The two parts actually start to exchange DNA, so even if you cut them apart, they’re always kind of linked to one another through that shared history,” she said.
“For me, it’s a similar thing to colonial nations now they still have this effect from being colonized in one way or another, whether it’s through their institutions, their language, cultural norms and expectations.”
The exhibition will also feature some local Indigenous work from the museum’s collection, Ngô said.
“It’s a moment for the museum to have a time to reflect on that collection, and what could be done to increase the information or research and resources put into the collection, but also to reconnect with some of the tribes in the area and have a discussion with them about what they want to do with some of these works.”
What: “Ungrafting” by Hương Ngô
When: Runs through July 27
Where: El Pomar Galleries at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.
Price: $10, $5 seniors/military, free for teachers/students and children under 12; 719-634-5581; fac.coloradocollege.edu
Huong Ngô, Latent Images (Grafts), 2021.
Huong Ngô, Latent Images (Grafts), 2021.
Hương Ngô, Latent Images (Grafts), 2021.