James Nguyen Open Glossary | Exhibition Kit

White shirt installation 2023 is an installation made from hundreds of preloved, button-up shirts that have been donated through a public call-out. Evoking a sense of child-like wonder, this sprawling maze of shirts is a screen for a myriad of personal memories and associations; the childhood joy of running through clean washing, laborious days at school and work, dressing up for special events, business meetings and religious ceremonies, and landfill. For Nguyen, these garments evoke specific references to his family’s textile factory, the deregulation of the textiles and footwear industry in 1980s Australia, the Angel Ally corridors used to safeguard queer protests and activities, and the socio-political sculptures of Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Lygia Pape* to name a few. 

Brought together on mass, the web of shirts suggests a relationship between individual lives and the collective.The white shirt has long held the promise of respectability and conformity**. Since the colonial era*** it has marked the spread of Western values and power across the globe but has also been adopted and integrated into non-Western cultural practices in idiosyncratic**** ways.

The installation has an important sound element and the shirts have been hung in a way that created an intimate enclosure for the recorded stories and experiences of a group of non-English speaking LGBTIQA+ migrants, living in Australia and spoken in their language. The overlapping voices and experiences detailed in a multitude of languages speak of the complex network of obstacles, barriers and pathways to belonging in their new homes and communities. White shirt installation celebrates the beauty and connections created through speaking in one’s own language, without the burden of translating and explaining in English.

Sound recordings from the installation can be heard here

 Inquiry question

• What do you think of when you think of white shirts? Explain your answer. 
• Why do you think the artist chose to hang so many white shirts?
• How has your relationship with your culture impacted the clothing you wear today?
• Create/Evaluate/Analyse If you had to create an installation using one primary material, what would you choose to work with and why and what form would it take?

*Neo-Concrete artist Lygia Pape – (7 April 1927 – 3 May 2004) was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. She was an important artist in the expansion of contemporary art in Brazil and pushed geometric art to include aspects of interaction and to engage with ethical and political themes.

**Conformity – compliance with standards, rules, or laws.

***Colonial era – The age of modern colonialism began about 1500 – Western colonialism, a political-economic phenomenon where various European nations explored, conquered, settled, and exploited large areas of the world. 

**** Idiosyncratic – having strange or unusual habits, ways of behaving, or feature

Conceived as a meeting space for negotiation and exchange, HuiHụi  2023 invites us to reflect on longstanding linguistic, cultural and spiritual connections across Indo-Pacific and Moana Polynesian communities.

HuiHụi is a manifestation of the shared term ‘Hui’, which is used in various forms across the Moana-Pacific region* to describe collective gatherings or negotiations. The Chinese character 會 (Huì), for example, represents  a longhouse where meetings and secret societies take place. In Hawaiian, Hui stands for a club, community partnership or extended family. The term has similar meanings in the artists’ own cultures, representing a meeting, congregation or conference in te reo Māori**, while for Vietnamese-Australians, Hụi is a covert collective loan-savings scheme for low-income families often used for major purchases, a family car, a house deposit, a small business loan. 

In HuiHụi viewers are invited into a darkened gallery space where they encounter a large ash painting on the ground of the gallery. They are asked to remove their shoes, gather around, contemplate and walk through the painting. Through this enveloping experience with the artwork the viewer is asked to consider the protocols and power of community and collective action, as well as the connected negotiations, obligations and tensions that they entail.

Adopting the formal language of painterly abstraction and hard edge minimalism***, along with the codes and practices of Western art institutions, including the use of anti-fatigue mats ordinarily used by gallery invigilators, the work wryly invites reflection on the kinds of communities and relationships that can be formed and sustained within the confines of contemporary art spaces.

Inquiry questions

• Do you have any rituals or customs that you follow in your home? Examples could include  removing your shoes when you get home, celebrating birthdays, bedtime stories, sharing a meal at a specific time every week.
• What are the communities that you belong to? This could be anything from your family to sports teams or book club.
• Why do you think the artist asked visitors to remove their shoes when entering the room?
• The ash painting in this artwork has a symbolic meaning, what do you think the ash is representing? 
• Create/Evaluate/Analyse If you had to create a gathering space, what would include in the space to help facilitate the coming together of a community?  

*Moana-Pacific region – An area in the Pacific Ocean of 1000’s of islands including Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, Toeklau and Hawaii. These polynesian Islands share similarities between their language, cultural practices and traditional beliefs. Moana means ocean in Māori and Hawaiian.

** te reo Māori – the language of the Māori people of New Zealand. In 1987 Te reo Māori became the official language of New Zealand.

*** Hard edge minimalism – The term ‘hard-edge’ was coined by Californian critic Jules Langsner in 1959. He used it to describe the work of those abstract painters, particularly on the West Coast of America, who reacted to the more painterly or gestural forms of abstract expressionism by adopting a consciously impersonal approach to paint application. Their paintings were made up of monochromatic fields of clean-edged colour which reinforced the flatness of the picture surface.

Key ideas and concepts: Participatory exhibitions, Sharing stories, Indigenous history, play and spatial transformation. 

This purpose-built art making space known as Lerty’s world is a vibrant, hands-on making-space and participatory installation for young people and the young at heart. Designed to invite participation and the crafting of participants own stories in relation to a range of pressing contemporary issues, including constitutional recognition for First Nations people, the Voice to Parliament and caring for Country. 

This participatory collaborative installation invites the viewer into a deeper experience with the artworks and themes in the space through the act of making and sharing. The nature of collaboration requires an active process of listening, responding and connecting with others which is an inherent part of the artist’s practice. The immersive space incorporates posters, animal hats and dioramas made from cardboard, paper, collage and other upcycled mixed media materials. The artists invite viewers to add to the unfolding stories in this purpose-built space. Participants can choose to wear one of the colourful animal hats while reading about Lerty in a zine titled Lerty’s Song.

The zine, Lerty’s Song written by Kate ten Buuren and illustrated by both ten Burren and Nguyen shares the story of Lerty the possum in her efforts to find her own voice and listen to Country. The story offers readers and participants a guide, giving context to the room and anchoring the visitors in their own journey of self expression and deeper understanding for Country. Gallery visitors are invited to take a zine and add pictures and words to make it their own story. 

The growing 3D cardboard diorama which grows throughout the exhibition on the walls, and across the floor invites viewers to add their own elements to represent Lerty’s world and Country responding to the questions:

When did you last feel heard? How did it make you feel?
How do you listen to Country?
How do you know that Country listens to you?

The wide variety of animal hats are symbolic of both the Chinese and Vietnamese Zodiac, ranging from a dragon to a tiger and ant. Nguyen and ten Buuren invite viewers to wear the hats while in the gallery evoking a sense of playfulness with their friends and family.

 Inquiry questions

• What stories about Country have been shared with you? – examples might be Dreaming stories or personal reflections or memories from family members. e?
• Why might Australian artists be interested in exploring ideas related to voice at this time? As of writing, we are two weeks out from The Voice referendum where Australians will have their say in a referendum about whether to change the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. See ACCA’s statement here.
• Share a story with a classmate describing your own experience listening to County. What is similar and different about the stories you’ve shared.