Phung Huynh
Hung Huynh (Grandfather), 2024
Graphite on pink donut box
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

“The first iteration of the pink donut box series started with my immediate family.” In 2019, Phung Huynh began to draw portraits on donut boxes. Starting with resettlement photos of her family in a refugee camp in Thailand–including images of herself as a baby–she expanded the series to include friends, neighbors, and children of other Southeast Asian refugees. The drawings in Living Here depict her grandparents and older brother. "I have a very complicated relationship to photographs and portraits because when we left, we couldn't bring any photos with us,” she explained to NPR in 2022. "And we use photographs to worship our ancestors.” Pink boxes became a staple of donut stores across large areas of the US after Cambodian American store owners in California began using them in the 1980s. Today, roughly 80% of all donut outlets across California are owned by Asian Americans. Huynh says she hopes her work will uplift her community and save her children from forgetting “where they come from.” “Making this body of work on pink donut boxes has always been my desire to pass on the story to my children. I’ve always wanted to do that.”