Artists statement

Racist Paintings is a series of works that seek to unpack art history, eugenics, language, and colonialism through the use of hard-edge painting, colonial ethnography and orientalist ideologies.

The works seek to do this by combining French colonial postcards from and of Vietnam, lines relating to key colonial structures, and the use of a limited Dulux colour pallet consisting of the colours ‘Pale Oriental’, ‘Oriental Bay’, ‘Oriental Rose’, ‘Oriental Princess’, ‘Oriental Blush’, ‘Oriental Blush Half’, and ‘Oriental Blush Quarter’.

Artist Bio
Phuong Ngo is an artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His practice is concerned with the interpretation of history, memory, and place, and how it impacts the individual and collective identity of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through an archival process rooted in a conceptual practice, he seeks to find linkages between culture, politics, oral histories, and historic events, which in turn dictates the materiality of his artistic output.

Ngo’s work has been curated into seminal institutional exhibitions including recently Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2022; Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10), QAGOMA 2021; (SLIPPAGE) Ballarat Foto Biennale, Ballarat 2021; Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art; Monash Gallery of Art; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne and Cheah Kongsi Obscura Festival, Penang, Malaysia. His solo exhibition Nostalgia For A Time That Never Was, was recently on at The Substation, Melbourne. In 2022 Ngo was named winner of the Banyule Award for Works on Paper and a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award.

Ngo also practices in collaboration with Hwafern Quach under the name SLIPPAGE. SLIPPAGE examines the cycles of history in conjunction with current geopolitical and economic issues through the lens of vernacular cultures, artifacts, and language.