KEVIN PHAN
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gia đình
Multi-channel video, family photo archive, 3D modeling
2024My mother and father left Việt Nam in 1979 and 1981, respectively. They were among some of the infamous boat people who traveled to America to seek refuge from a postwar-Việt Nam. Prior to their arrival in America, both of my parents were sent to reeducation camps intended to assimilate Vietnamese refugees to the Whiteness of America. In these camps, there were English lessons and lectures on life in America. However, there was a specific emphasis on ideas of ‘production’ and independency taught in these camps. This video speaks to this expectation (or frankly imposition) of hard labor as a means to survive in America. 





Shown at RailSpur Gallery
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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 received an MFA in Photo/Media at the University of Washington in 2024. 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?