Hương Ngô: This Space Is for Lost Time

Aug 10 - Oct 3, 2024

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present This Space Is for Lost Time, a solo exhibition by artist Hương Ngô.

This Space Is for Lost Time marks a return to Hương Ngô’s early art practice of working with technology as subject and medium as she engages the history of her parents’ labor as assembly line workers in electronics factories during the 1980s–2000’s. At these factories, Ngô's parents, like many other Southeast Asian refugees, created capacitors, resistors, and motherboards – components which modulate tempo, pitch, and memory. Using vintage components from these very factories, Ngô creates delicate, free-form sculptures that uplift the labor and creativity of her parents, while also gesturing towards the complex and non-linear relationships amongst time, trauma, and futurity.

Outside of work, Ngô's family gardened, providing them access to the flavors and smells that reminded them of the home they left behind. For Ngô, it created: “a different timescale that didn’t require them to clock in. It asked for an awareness of the weather, a remembrance of last year’s harvest and failures, and patience to push past the present.” Ngô intertwines these very different keepers of time–the electronic components and plants–as potent symbols of labor, resilience, and care. Unruly vines disrupt gridded circuits, which now function as supports for a new tenderness to thrive.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ngô elaborates on intergenerational transmission of knowledge through collaborations with her young child, Khải. Recesses for creativity and criticality are woven into the gallery, physically carving out space for time to be lost: productively and beautifully.  

Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies (2004) and was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow (2011-2012). She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for work that has been described as "deftly and defiantly decolonial" by New City and "what intersectional feminist art looks like'' by the Chicago Tribune. Ngô's achievements also include being a CAC BOLT resident (2016), recipient of 3Arts and Next Level Awards (2018, 2020), Illinois Art Council Fellowship (2022), the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2024), and being featured in the Prague Biennial (2005) and Prospect.5 Triennial (2021).

She has exhibited her solo and collaborative work at numerous institutions including more recently: The Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO (2024); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Hessel Museum of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2023); The Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2022), CAC Cincinatti, OH (2021); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); The Factory Contemporary Art Centre, HCMC, VN (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2020); The Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2019); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong, SAR (2017); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2017); Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi, VN (2016). Her collaboration with Hồng-Ân Trương is on long-term display at Chicago O'Hare's International Airport, and her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, DePaul Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Walker Art Center, among others.

She is currently a visiting lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara. She was recently an assistant professor of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she helped to institute the school’s first department-wide anti-racism committee.

This Space Is for Lost Time is organized by TSA Chicago Member, Noah Hanna.