Phuong Ngo – Inheritance (Di Sản)

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Inheritance (Di Sản) is a photobook by contemporary artist, Phuong Ngo. Published a century after Ngo’s ancestral home was first built in rural Vietnam, Inheritance (Di Sản) is a deeply personal document seeking to reframe histories of occupation, conflict and displacement through ancestral and material transformation. Accompanying an exhibition of the same title, this publication focuses on the intimacies and interconnections of a familial archive. Built in 1925 and torn down in 2016, Ngo’s maternal ancestral home (located in Mỹ Xuyên, Sóc Trăng) stood witness to French colonisation, the American War/Vietnam War, and the subsequent loss and migration of family. Everything in the house had been sold at the end of the war; only a single table—composed of marble and wood—remained. A century later, Ngo collected debris from the ancestral home and transformed its remains into new domestic objects for future generations. In the form of a design swatch book, Inheritance (Di Sản) samples elements of materials relevant to the artist: from marble textures to wood grains, old black and white photographs to digital family portraits, the book design interprets this photographic archive as a new method to make meaning from what feels like a tangential arrangement of memories. Personal yet expansive, Inheritance (Di Sản) is an exploration of memory across multiple generations that invites the reader to playfully re-imagine their own familial narratives through fragmentation and re-organisation. Show more