Today we’d like to introduce you to Hùng Lê.
Hùng, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the majority of my life before moving to Kansas City to pursue a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute. I originally wanted to major in animation, but was introduced to fiber during my first year of undegrad, which drastically changed the trajectory of my practice. During my time in undergrad, I began to recognize the role that language plays in shaping collective consciousness. As I was researching the American War in Việt Nam, I encountered gaps within the archives that failed to articulate the Vietnamese experience. The majority of the documents, films, and books created surrounding the war were in English and centered on the American perspective, creating a narrow, one-sided telling of history. This understanding fostered my fascination with archives and memories as a way to analyze how we as a society decide who and what is worth remembering. This obsession with researching memories has led me to pursuing an MFA at WashU to further this research.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It hasn’t always been a smooth road, especially for anyone working in a creative field. After graduating with my BFA, I had to figure out a lot of thing on my own once I lost access to the facilities and structural support that the college provided. However, this was also an opportunity for me to expand my community further and lean on the support of my peers and friends who were also in similar positions. We started looking for opportunities to collaborate on exhibitions together, split studio spaces to afford the rent, and became each other’s point of contact for critical feedbacks and dialogue.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Immigrating to the United States from Việt Nam at a young age shaped a complex and multifaceted sense of identity that has been a generative force in my thinking and in my studio practice. As a bilingual and transnational, I was keenly made aware of how languages facilitate our imagination and our capacity to communicate our lived experiences. Because of this, my research serves as the foundation within my practice to investigate how personal memories are recorded and utilized compared to how collective memories are created and preserved. By utilizing fabric, photographs, and found objects, layered with laser engraving and indigo dyeing, memories are excavated and manifest as installations, piecings, and collages, serving as a means to define and redefine individual identity. Through these processes, personal and collective memories become physical spaces where their credibility is questioned, modified, and pieced back together.
Within my work, the entanglement of personal and collective memories challenges the authorship of history and raises questions of who gets to be the keeper of history and who is left behind and forgotten.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The best way to see more of my work or contact me would be through my website, hunglestudio.com, or reach out through my instagram, @monsieur.ratty.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hunglestudio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monsieur.ratty/
