KEVIN PHAN
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tiệm làm nail

Single-channel video
2023 In this video piece, I was thinking about my mother and her prayers day and night for my sister and I, my father, and others important to her both in the past and the present. This is a ritual of her life. Unfortunately, another aspect of her daily life is her work as a nail technician 7 days a week. I know this is not her ideal and seeing how people review and perceive Asian service workers, I wanted to make this video critiquing those who enjoy the byproducts of Asian service and labor while dismissing and/or even relegating the Asian American to a point of invisibility. Simultaneously, I wanted to create something that highlights my mother and suggest at a futurity of potential. 




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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?