Hanh Ngo

Born 1971, Kien Giang, Vietnam 

Hanh Ngo is motivated to grapple with the discrepancies of autobiographical reconstruction, however resists the cool, seductive remove of photographic documentation to find an earthier, and ultimately more controversial means of "decoding" fragments of Vietnamese Diasporic memory. She offers up pieces of richly pigmented tapestries, hand–crafted with signs and decorative patterns that are dislocated from their linguistic grammar, from a literature that knits social drama and poetic tragedy out of human grunts, shrieks and sighs. Here Ngo speaks of both Vietnamese and Australian language, giving voice to the alienated Viet Kieu, a Vietnamese expatriate, an outsider to her country of origins, an insider to her land of emigration.

Caught in complex warp of past and present, Ngo defiantly weaves an indigenous Vietnamese craft tradition into International Art practice, in order to capture the texture and history of psychological dislocation.

M.A. Greensteinfrom her Samstag catalogue essay, Back to the Future – From Wry to Rave
 
1999 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1999 Graduate Program, Hanoi, Institute of Fine Arts, Vietnam 
1997 Master of Arts (Visual Arts), Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra 
1993 Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra