In May 2025, Prof. Christina Hughes (Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN) and Prof. Ly Thuy Nguyen (Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN) co-curated and collaborated with three other feminist/queer Vietnamese artists to open the group exhibition RE/HOMING: WALK-INS WELCOME to correspond to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The exhibition was sited at XIA Gallery in Saint Paul’s Little Mekong business district, a vibrant diasporic community built by postwar refugees with a distinct voice in the Upper Midwest. Taking up the aesthetics of the refugee nail salon as a way to probe the feminine and queer undertow of war and resettlement within the Vietnamese diaspora, the show’s subtitle WALK-INS WELCOME borrows from the phrase commonly found on shop signage to subvert its meaning. Rejecting the assumption that refugee women’s gendered service labor is always readily available, the exhibit alternatively recasts the gallery as a space of unequivocal welcome for refugees and immigrants regardless of the economic value they are demanded to add to the nation-state.
The participating works include Los Angeles-based filmmaker Quyên Nguyen-Le’s In Living Memory of Nước (Water/Homeland), Orange County-raised scholar and artist Christina Hughes’ Infrastructures of Feeling; Hanoi-born and Minneapolis-based scholar and artist Ly T. Nguyen’s Motherlands; Hanoi-born and Chicago-based artist and curator Nhung Walsh’s “It Was A Beautiful Day And There Was No Fog“; and Saint Paul-based artist and writer N.’s Handle with Care.
Developed in close collaboration, the artworks materialize landscapes that are real and imaginative, dedicated to the survival and inheritance of Vietnamese matrilineal lines, and in relation to other discarded-yet-grievable lives historically left littered and washed ashore in the wake of colonization, masculinist wars, and nation-building projects. Thematically, the show explores the compound material debris and emotional resonances produced from: being alienated by a nation-state that racializes precarious migrants as perpetual foreigners; being alienated from dominant commemoration regimes that tend to center male soldiers, including but not limited to U.S. veterans and South Vietnamese allies; being alienated from one’s own family due to gender roles under patriarchal political systems; and being alienated from the most intimate parts of oneself and others in service of capitalist and militarized-state prerogatives.
In the wake of this past winter’s Operation Metro Surge that brought the full force of federal immigration enforcement to Minnesota, especially Minneapolis-Saint . Paul, the curators return to RE/HOMING one year after its run to launch the publication of its digital exhibit and discuss how the show’s feminist concerns might speak to this moment of intensive xenophobic violence towards immigrants living both within the state and beyond.
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Ly Thuy Nguyen: To start, let’s talk about how this show started and later, how the work from it could speak to this moment of anti-immigrant militarism. What are your personal entry points and commitments that brought you to planning this exhibition?
Christina Hughes: I grew up in Orange County’s Little Saigon as a second-generation kid to two parents who settled there in the late 1970s and ran a shop in Phước Lộc Thọ. Prior to that, my dad lived in Nam Định before migrating with his parents as part of the Bắc 54 cohort, ultimately settling in Cholon (Chợ Lớn) during his teenage years. My mom was born in the south near Long Khánh, and my maternal side lived and worked around Vũng Tàu and later Saigon during the war. Both sides of my family were processed separately through Camp Pendleton and sponsored in the Mid- and Mountain West before eventually making their way back to Southern California. Growing up along Bolsa and being born and raised in that time and place of intensive “refugee nationalism,” so much of what I experienced was refracted through a gendered lens. It was always clear that Little Saigon was a neighborhood shaped by founder men — developers like Frank Jao, figures like Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, politicians like Tony Lam, etc. The gang panic of the 1990s also largely focused on the boys and men implicated in the most salacious criminal cases. But in the background I saw the wives behind the influential men and knew the girlfriends that got caught up in others’ court cases.
I think there’s something about being a young girl noticing how the women in her life were being overlooked, devalued, or discarded in various measures by the people and society around them while also being expected to carry so much that planted a kind of premature bitterness in me from a young age. Probing my own biographical memories of maternal incarceration and of visiting California’s carceral spaces for Infrastructures of Feeling, my works meditate on the relationship between gendered punishment, prison abolition, and border abolition from a refugee feminist feeling, or condition, of disposability. I wanted the exhibit to take emotions seriously so that “ugly feelings” like feminine bitterness or chronic grief became “sticky” in a larger affective economy, not necessarily isolated to something we misrecognize as spontaneously — or hysterically — arriving out of nowhere. In particular the pieces explore the notion of affective seepage where the slow creep and overwhelm of the granny-square blanket over the carceral architecture of the securitized visiting booth aesthetically brings together these ideas to highlight the latent power held within the overlooked experiences of incarcerated Southeast Asian/refugee women who often fall out of mainstream view. Even incarcerated and systems-impacted Southeast Asian men have barely been visible in the broader cultural sphere, so the work asks what space is there for the women that I knew and still know who find themselves sentenced in places like FCC Victorville, often due to compound effects of state and interpersonal patriarchal harm. What I felt we still needed 50 years after the “end” of the war is to make room for these gaps and omissions in dominant conversations, and the show begins from wanting to hear what these gaps might tell us and push us to materialize.
What about you? What are your entry points? When we first met three years ago, I remember you were already conceptualizing your performance piece.
LTN: When you initially approached me about the exhibition in 2024, I had been tracing my own matrilineal history, which was the context for all three pieces I developed for this exhibition, including the performance piece. Born and raised in postwar Hanoi in the decade following the end of the war, I developed similar feelings about the heteropatriarchal nature of cultural belonging. The pieces in my installation Motherlands paid respect to a specific type of feminine exile and dispossession that Vietnamese women endured, not only during the many wars of colonization that ravaged our lands, but even within the patriarchal family records. Having grandfathers from both sides as soldiering patriarchs and growing up in a culture that reveres them, I see how the masculinist politics of recognition in Vietnam could epistemologically discard generations of women in my family.
My mother was born two years after the end of the First Indochina War, which was essentially a U.S.-funded war for the French recolonization of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian territories that were seized by Imperial Japan during World War II. She was raised mostly by her grandmother, who owned a family business with her sisters in Quảng Bình. By the end of this war (1945-1954), the sisters were all separated, and my great grandmother had become a widow. Her daughter, my grandmother, already gave up her elite high school education to lead the family business, ended up marrying my grandfather, a political prisoner just released from a French prison. In the wake of the Geneva Accords that divided Vietnam into two countries, my grandmother’s family gave up their wealth, private land, and properties, left their hometown in Quảng Bình, and moved all over Central and North Vietnam to support my grandfather’s revolutionary path.
Materially this is what it takes for the national liberation project — sacrifices that are not rendered as “loss” or “dispossession” but accepted in our culture as women’s fate, or politicized as contentious and “willful,” that is, something revolutionary women are praised for. Globally and in the U.S. during the antiwar movement and Third World solidarity movement of the long 1960s, Vietnamese revolutionary women, specifically liberation army women, were regarded as symbols of anti-imperialist feminism and to this day, that image continues to be celebrated as such. In the Vietnam I grew up in, because these feminized sacrifices were idealized and normalized, with time, they became effaced while the masculine sacrifices of soldiers became national culture. At the end of her life, my grandmother couldn’t even be buried with her husband who rested in the military graveyard tended to by the State. None of them – my great grandmother, my grandmother, and even my grandfather could spend their final rest in the family graveyard in their birthplace. These are all the intimate and untold sacrifices that helped materialize the national liberation, as well as pointing out its unfinished nature.
