Hương Ngô’s installation And the State of Emergency Is Also Always a State of Emergence, is included in the Visualizing Abolition exhibition Seeing through Stone. For this piece, Ngô created a six-by-four-by-eleven-foot bunk bed frame, similar to those found in crowded rooms of jails, detention centers, and prisons across the globe, out of reinforced paper. This precarious architectural sculpture is based on the stories told by Ngô’s siblings about her family’s nearly two-year-long stay, when they were children, in a Hong Kong detention center.
Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work attends to refugee epistemologies, expanding concepts of time and knowledge to those that are generational, ecological, ruptured, and reconstructed. Often beginning with research in national and personal archives, she realizes her work through installation, works on paper, and performance. Ngô’s artistic practice has been recognized and exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MCA Chicago, the New Museum in New York, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, among others. She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam in 2016 and was featured in the Prague Biennial in 2005 and Prospect.5 Triennial in 2021. Ngô is currently visiting lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara.
