By Debbie Cuthbertson, The Age
Melbourne artist Phuong Ngo wasn’t nervous before he went in, but several hours into his 10-day art installation Article 14.1, he’s wondering what he has let himself in for.
Phuong Ngo folds paper boats. Photo: Angela Wylie.
Whatever happens – hunger, cold, boredom – at least he knows that No Vacancy Gallery at QV Melbourne is far safer than the boat his pregnant mother Tien, malnourished five-month-old brother Phong and people-smuggler father Hoang travelled to Australia on in 1982 after fleeing Vietnam.
During his performance Ngo, 30, aims to fold 10,000 boats made out of fake currency while subsisting on the same rations his family lived on during their journey. (Visitors will be able to join in with the folding while listening to recorded stories of Vietnamese boat people.)
Ngo’s work is part of a larger project, an ”ongoing interrogation” into his parents’ experiences, which he grew up regularly hearing about around the dinner table, and documented in a blog.
The foodstuffs he has brought with him echo his family’s experience. ”My mum … she couldn’t eat. She had my brother who was five months old. She stopped lactating and was malnourished, my brother was malnourished. She gave him condensed milk with water but he refused it.”
Read the full article by Debbie Cuthbertson from The Age.
