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“The Dismantling of Southern Photography” New Southern Photography Panel Discussion
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Meet New Southern Photography Artists This Weekend at the O! Free Film Screening and Panel Discussion
This Friday, January 11 at 7 p.m., the Ogden Museum of Southern Art will be showing a screening of the film, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” by New Southern… Read More about Meet New Southern Photography Artists This Weekend at the O! Free Film Screening and Panel Discussion
Happy Birthday George Dureau! Today We Celebrate You!
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![Featured in “Hoa Tay (Flower Hands)” is @phammilliangiang’s “Buffalo Bum: Cycle Breaker.”
Pham’s series “Viet Kitsch: Lacquer Luster" puts a twist on a traditional Vietnamese art form. Lacquer painting is a technique that Vietnam is famous for, with its specialized wooden canvases and glistening sheen often derived from mother-of-pearls or eggshell materials.
For Pham, whose practice concerns a critical obfuscation that fights legibility, texts and images often juxtaposed one another to question the pre-established conventions of fine art.
“Buffalo Bum” in particular is a cheeky reference to the Vietnamese slang ‘Trẻ trâu’, often referring to the rebellious youth with an oversized ego. In this context, it can also refer to someone that sits around all day with nothing pressing or urgent to attend to.
Pham cites communicative discrepancy between her and her parents, both linguistically and ideologically, to be one of the inspirations behind the piece. “Romanticized images of rural living are mixed with texts that question traditional notions of gender, class and culture,” she writes.
Following the war, many Vietnamese families in America found themselves hustling to assimilate, both financially and socially. The effects of this hard work often manifests through tense conversations with their children and high expectations that cause a rift in familial relationships.
With the piece aptly titled “Buffalo Bum: Cycle Breaker,” perhaps Pham is leading the viewer towards a space where relaxation and slowness is key, and the cycle of toxic expectations can be broken after all.
You can view Pham’s work in “Hoa Tay (Flower Hands),” on view at the O through September 21.
[Millian Pham Lien Giang, “BUFFALO BUM: CYCLE BREAKER” (Detail), 2022, Acrylic paint and bead embroidery, 38 x 19 inches, Courtesy of the artist]](https://ogdenmuseum.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)