In 2023 we’re continuing our Storefront Window Installation Artist interviews where we pair our exhibiting artists with other artists and curators for interview conversations. This December - January we were pleased to host justine nguyễn-nguyễn’s installation.
justine hồng-giang nguyễn-nguyễn was born on a Monday morning; today, she is making, mending, and writing. Rooted in experience as a garment worker, her work converses with the cultural and corporeal histories of the hand-me-down. Her interstitial, associative practice resembles a form of nesting—she is a child of Vietnamese refugees, birdwatchers—restoring value to scrap material with a slow and sentimental hand. Alongside a textile repair service, nguyễn-nguyễn is working on an interlingual poetic manuscript, "second chants," which draws upon clumsy translation and reduplication to frame familiarity/foreignness and accumulation/erosion as binocularity rather than binary.
Below is a convo between justine and writer/artist Mary-Kim Arnold.
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MKA: justine, It’s been such a joy to see some of the range of your work — text, textiles, jewelry, image — and I was struck by how, and across all these forms, I observe a spareness, a delicacy, and an evocation of time. In Earring 23, for example, seeing the integration of discarded or broken materials, a crumpled metal leaf in this case, into such a delicate, expressive shape reminds me that these objects have had their own histories, their own pasts. And certainly, in your mending work, the often subtle but visible form your stitches take, call to mind the garment’s wear and its previous forms and iterations. Can you speak to how you think about time in relation to re-using or re-purposing existing materials in your work?
Earring 023, single earring, sterling silver with Biwa rice pearls, crumpled metal leaf, hollow Bedouin bell
jn-n: Thank you, Mary-Kim, for sifting through my work with such care.
As in a Vietnamese household, the bàn thờ is an important reference in my art and writing practices. I think of the altar in relation to Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios, sculptural installation activated by ritual. It enacts the retrospective gesture of honoring one’s ancestors—which could also extend to one’s creative influences—but to be honest, it’s also a convenient depot for ripening fruit. (I’ve been thinking about this idea of ripeness as a relative readiness, rather than a fixed point.)
I started working with joss paper, which is typically burned as offerings to deities and the dead, in 2020. Apart from my aesthetic identification with it, I like the idea of creating with material that was never meant to last (at least in this realm), decentralizing my artistry/authorship within a more expansive timespace—this is also, in ecological terms, the core of sustainability.
I am, admittedly, over sentimental, but I also consider repurposing material as a form of resistance. After leaving my last job, I tore apart the pants that had become my work uniform, incorporating the charcoal-stained linen into a textile piece (on view at Dirt Palace). It felt like a reclamation of the time I spent in that studio, a private renunciation of the kind of indentured servitude that fuels the clout economy of the art world.
MKA: In your online journal, you refer to your “magpie” curiosity, which in one interpretation might suggest the collecting and gathering of shiny objects. You are talking about a collection of fishing lures in this case, and I’m wondering how you think about the things you gather and work with. Does an object (or set of objects) simply “speak” to you in some way, or do you tend to approach your materials more thematically or symbolically?
jn-n: My parents raised us in fear of wastefulness. So I think my foraging, born from a chronic sense of mottainai, is probably equal parts compulsion and curiosity. The urge to rescue heavily distressed clothing—what is called a “wounded bird” in the vintage vernacular—is comically strong, to the point where I’ll use “as is” and “for study”—disclaimers of damage—as search terms. These older garments are often constructed with material and craftsmanship of a quality that is rare these days, and I feel that I am not only restoring the functionality of the clothing, but also redirecting attention to this way of making.
That being said, I am heavily guided by resonances, associations, and sentimentality, which often defy typical value systems applied to material, especially those based upon scarcity.
Magpie curiosity also pulls me into these warrens of research, and whatever esoteric debris that gets lodged in my brain often resurfaces in my poems as symbols.
MKA: You have experience as a tailor and apparel designer, which of course, requires thinking about, and attending to the body of the wearer and their comfort as well as other needs. So, the idea of the wearer is ever-present, even when you are working on the garment itself they are not physically present with you. To me, there is something so evocative about this constant presence-absence, and I wonder whether that’s a tension that seems relevant or meaningful to you and your process in other types of work?
jn-n: For sure. Because I’m so nostalgic by nature, memory is one such presence-absence that is foundational to my process, certainly with mending—the practice of responding to a tangible accumulation of memory that conversely, manifests as erosion.
In perfumery, sillage (from the French for "wake”) refers to the scent trail which is left behind by the wearer.
I take silences very seriously, as equal to words. Maybe because my reticence is often mistaken for blankness. Maybe because my background in garment-making has trained me to be hyperconscious of the interdependence between the interior and exterior. In composing a poem, I work with the interstitial negative space between words as a form of punctuation. Shaping these silences/spaces helps me suggest a pace for the reader. It also allows me to weave motifs into the warp and weft of my stanzas, using enjambment to form a kind of selvedge.
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, a sock has at least one hole, etc. etc.
MKA: In your Instagram feed, I noticed the juxtaposition of four images of hands. Although I’m guessing this may have been a fortuitous coincidence in the way the grid appeared at the time I saw it, it made me think about hand-work, mending being a prominent example of that. It seems there’s been a strong (popular?) desire for a return to the hand-made, the slow, careful work of stitching and making by hand. What are some of the pleasures of mending and hand-stitching, for you?
jn-n: haha I’m glad you noticed the cairn of hands; I’m guilty of pruning my Instagram feed to compose such improbable balancing acts.
The hand is my tool of preference—for sewing, but also rituals of eating (I’m especially fond of foods that reach for your hand, like those wrapped in leaves or clinging to bone) or self-pleasure, because of its haptic immediacy and intimacy. Machines often startle me. I recently attempted to use an electric toothbrush for the first time and ended up wielding it manually, forgoing the vibrating function. I never got accustomed to wearing a thimble, even, preferring the reciprocal puncturing of skin and fabric; my middle fingertip on my left hand is perpetually calloused.
I take pleasure in the precision that hand-stitching invites. The pick-stitch, for example, involves picking up only a few threads of the fabric, sometimes on only one side, with minimal or no interruption of the outer face. In my series of talismans, I’ve developed a style of freehand embroidery that shifts between back-stitching and chain-stitching to manipulate the visual velocity of line, not unlike calligraphy. These two particular stitches reinforce the idea of time as cyclical—one has to loop backward in order to complete a forward intention. It is this pace that allows me to make marks with intuition, because I’m able to shift direction at any point along a line, a kind of slow-burning spontaneity.
Simultaneously, I find complementary value in loosening the reins. The humble running (for me, a misnomer) stitch, which most closely aligns with the rhythm of the breath, often lulls me into a meditative state. The precision with which I engage neither privileges nor aspires to uniformity. It is, instead, a practice of sensitivity and an expression of care. As I once told a client: “Mending by hand is so time intensive and inefficient that it inevitably becomes a kind of gift. For me, it is an anticapitalist choice and, therefore, a restorative practice.”
Hand-craft also offers the satisfaction of self-sufficiency; instead of being anchored to the sewing machine—a posture ingrained with memories of undervalued labor—I can carry a seven square centimeter sewing kit (needles, pins, thread, the smallest scissors) upon my body, wherever it may be. It places my value within my self, rather than a context of production.
I used to work at an artist’s studio as part of a team creating large scale sculptural pieces on panels. An interesting paradox arose in the way the other assistants and I were instructed to periodically rotate, at once acknowledging the individuality of our hand, in the sense of penmanship and of labor, while seeking to erase it.
MKA: In spending time with images of your work, I find myself thinking about layers — literal, in patching and mending, but also this layered idea of time — the previous (and future) wearers of the antique French trousers, for example — and of the feminist, futurist idea of “thick time,” a space where past, present, and future intersect as a way to think about belonging and collective action. I find this particularly compelling in thinking about displaced peoples, as an idea of diaspora. I wonder whether you think of this simultaneity (for the lack of a better term?) as informing your work?
jn-n: My engagement with impermanence definitely stems from an intergenerational relationship with displacement (translation in the Euclidean sense). I come from a family of refugees.
But I’m not really interested in escaping marginalization; I’m far more interested in drawing power into peripheral spaces—what I call “subterranean text”—subtitles, footnotes, appendices, parentheticals —which scaffolds and enriches our understanding. The murmur of subterranean text disrupts a dominant linearity and univocality that is at best boring and at worst oppressive.
MKA: You mention drawing on the idea of “clumsy translation” in your writing, which to my mind, is closely aligned with the tenets of hand-work, a kind of turning away from the (im)possibility of the “perfect” or transactional translation, to something less legible, messier, resisting binaries, perhaps (again) your magpie sensibility. Can you speak to what compels you to these approaches in your writing? Early influences or experiences with language to which you trace this relationship?
jn-n: Vietnamese is sometimes considered a monosyllabic language, but it is actually dependent upon compounding monosyllables to create new words. Much of my poetic manuscript, second chants, revolves around reduplication, one of these morphological processes in which a word, or its stem, is repeated exactly or with a slight variation. Đỏ (red) is diluted through this kind of modified doubling, becoming đo đỏ (reddish), as if a carbon copy.
Reduplication appeals to me because it finds meaning in slippage and skewing, and I've always felt a bit skewed, especially in the context of a neurotypical society. As a kid, I was sent to speech therapy—my elementary school teachers reported that my peers had difficulty understanding me—in which the therapist apparently detected a low self-esteem along with my misarticulation of the /r/. I can’t confirm if I suffered from low self-esteem as a child, but I do remember struggling to articulate mysterious bouts of sadness. I still struggle to articulate my emotions, even internally. Poetry often feels like a refuge from legibility—the Glissantian “right to opacity”—as much as it is a process of finding it.
Rarely does a title make itself at home so early in my process; "second chants," however, has been an anchor. It references the bodily resonance of an ancestral tongue I cannot speak, as well as a renewed opportunity to grasp this foreign-familiar language by fumbling around in the dark rather than bật đèn. The double meaning—and doubling itself—is a cord/chord that runs through the project. I am invested in binocularity as an alternative to binary, in interpreting the world through relativity, refraction, convergence.
My limited fluency in Vietnamese continues to be a source of insecurity, but I’ve also embraced entering the language through an aesthetic cat flap of sorts, sonic and visual, rather than the semantic. I pick up vocabulary in the same way I would a stray lá from the sidewalk, letting the function of words follow form.
Because I am ignorant of how to properly string together phrases, I feel emboldened to mess around a little with syntax. In Vietnamese, there are set classifiers that chaperone nouns, which must be memorized; cuộn, for example, denotes nouns that are spooled, such as thread or a cassette. Lá, as a classifier, indicates the leaf-like quality (size, thinness) of playing cards. Apart from shape and weight, classifiers can also impart a sense of animation, arrangement, or function. I’m interested in a poetic of engineered glitching, such as mismatching classifiers to shift the embedded context or characterization of a noun.*
*In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, Tilda Swinton’s character struggles to describe a recurring sound in her non-native Spanish: “a big ball/of concrete/falling into a metal well/surrounded by seawater.” Later, at dinner, she asks her nephew what he is drawing—“An orange?” It is a pomelo, something he has neither seen nor tasted before. The scenes aren’t explicitly related, but become resonant, by Vietnamese logic, via the classifier quả, which designates globular objects (fruit, the Earth).
I analogize this nghiêng nghiêng textual approach to ikat, an Indonesian/Malay word applied broadly to the traditional textile technique known as atlas, kasuri, mudmee, and jaspe amongst various cultures, in which yarns are resist-dyed before being woven into cloth. As it is difficult to intentionally align the pre-dyed yarns on the loom, the approximate formation of patterns and motifs results in a characteristic blurriness. For me, these blurred images connote a relative velocity. I like to collect the frequent mishearings or misreadings that arise from my delays in processing, like the Barthesian punctum—“that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
In working with this kind of found material, I think of the practice of remixing, particularly the legacy of DJ Screw, who first developed the analog chopped and screwed technique by spinning two copies of the same record at a slight delay.** Splicing them with the crossfader, scratching to repeat phrases and double up beats, Screw then crucially slowed down the recorded (reduplicative) composite track, reducing its pitch, expanding time in a way that allowed the storytelling aspect of the music to sink in.
**Reminiscent to me of dupioni, a plain weave silk with an irregular, slubbed surface, which is produced using thread from a pair of silkmoths who spin a cocoon together.
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Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, and teacher. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press). Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Mary-Kim teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.
