Phung Huynh
Americanization, 2022
Mixed media collage
Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025.

A variety of Chinese and Vietnamese figures intermingle in Phung Huynh‘s Americanization. They include the Lady of La Vang (a vision of the Virgin Mary that manifested in Vietnam’s La Vang rainforest in 1798), a National Geographic magazine image of Chinese women in Shanghai getting a perm in 1980, photographs from a textbook that show one of the first Chinese families in California, and Chinese families in traditional clothing pledging allegiance to the American flag. This amalgamation hints at the challenges that faced Huynh’s Vietnamese family when they arrived in the United States, initially as the first group of Southeast Asians in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and then as members of a predominantly Chinese community in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. “We had access to language and food that was more similar to our culture,” she remembers, “but we were also othered for not having assimilated. The installation of drawings peels the layers of this complicated journey.”