Artist: Alvin Luong
Medium: photography printed on tarp
Dimensions: 84 x 123 ¼ in / 213 x 313 cm
Alvin Luong creates artworks based on stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic communities. These stories are combined with biography, humor, and magic realism to produce artworks that reflect on how people are intimately affected by historical developments in society. The artist has concentrated on tracing the multi-generational migrations by his family from persecution, poverty, and war in Asia Pacific in order to anticipate how future crises in the region, such as Climate Change, may further affect people. Underpinning Luong’s practice is a questioning of contemporary subjectivity in a globalized world that at once restricts and allows for the flow of people, culture, and commodities.
A Voluminous Crush is made to appear as if a real estate development billboard advertisement has been soiled by a rising flood. The artist depicts his family home in the southern outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City with a green voluminous tide encroaching on the home. Within this green tide are hundreds of drawings of the wild Southeast Asian vegetable, rau muống. This vegetable was once rationed to the artist’s family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and currently thrives in the ever increasing flooded areas of Ho Chi Minh City.