Sour Sun

A starting point for my recent bodies of work was the motivation and creation behind my first phonebook, Sour Sun. I initially started working on an idea for a book at the end of 2019. However, the direction quickly shifted once the pandemic hit and we found ourselves at the height of a perceived increase in racism against Asian folks at large.

As someone who was born and raised in Denmark, a country seemingly deemed as a Scandinavian pillar of progressivism, but certainly not, the ramifications of the worldwide statistics and stories of hate crime and discrimination further amplified racial traumas within my family and me.

While confined to my small room under lockdown, with limited studio space and the inventory of my parents’ home (which also happened to be the home I grew up in), I began looking through objects and scenarios which were present in my upbringing.

The book looks to examine Southeast-Asian shapes of consumerism, taste and fetishisation through the optics of a second-generation migrant born and raised in a Nordic country.

By utilising post-internet photographic tropes, along with my personal ties and heritage to Southeast Asian visual cultures, the images attempt to re-contextualise certain motifs and iconographies.

Sour Sun can be bought on my website.

Minh Ngọc Nguyễn is part of »Guest Room: Heather Canlas Rigg & Emmy Lee Wall«.

Check out his Artist Feature “Everlasting Karaoke”.