September 27, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Hương NGÔ's (ACC 2024) latest exhibition, “Hương Ngô: Core Memory”, presented by Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) and The Riviera Beach House, synthesizes the artist’s reflections on her family’s time in refugee camps — after fleeing Vietnam — and their experiences as new immigrants to the United States. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate histories often overlooked in the traditional narratives of labor and migration.

As assembly line laborers Ngô’s parents worked night shifts, overtime and holidays. “They wouldn’t take a job unless it had overtime possibilities — everyone knew that was where the real money was made!” Ngô wrote in her essay for the recent exhibition “Hương Ngô: This Space Is for Lost Time” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago (Aug. 10–Oct 3, 2024). “As a child, I had no idea what they were even making until we visited their factories one day and they passed around their products: tiny, colorful electronic components with metal wires on both sides.” 

Using similar vintage components, she created circuits as sculptures that gesture towards her parents’ creativity, efforts not legible in the output of their wage labor.  

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