KEVIN PHAN
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49

Inkjet prints on time punch cards, family photo archive
24.5” x 63”
2024When an individual dies, it takes seven weeks (or 49 days) for them to be reborn. 

With this triptych, I employ the punch card as a means to confront the expendable and interchangeable Asian laborer. In accumulating capital, the West disregards the many lives necessary to sustain dominance and the US empire’s place as the center. In this work, I consider the losses that haunt diasporic communities and consider the potential of co-opting our relegation. How can we subvert implications of illegibility to divest power from American hegemony? 




Installation during Another Day at the Orifice
RailSpur Gallery
Photo taken by Jacob Chung

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Kevin Quang Phan (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He earned his BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2020 and is currently an MFA candidate in Photo/Media at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work addresses the illegibility of Asians in the White supremacist state and how modes of illegibility can be used to reject homogeneity and push for Asian American autonomy and agency. 

Artist Statement

Through my works, I have acknowledged the varying realities of the Vietnamese American experience. I confront the labor expectations and violences imposed upon my family using both video and photographic archives. Generally, the Asian American experience is haunted by losses: loss of culture, loss of agency, and loss of livelihoods. Unfortunately, there exist myriad voids and gaps across Asian American histories due to historic exclusions of Asians since America’s inception. In my navigation of the family archive, I create works that address these gaps and recontextualize our pasts as potentials and futurities that reject gendered and racialized rhetoric afflicting Asian America. What could have been if the U.S. had not intervened in the American War in Vietnam? How can we make use of illegibility and unintelligibility to shirk consignments of the U.S. empire?