O

In O, artist and writer Tammy Nguyen returns to Vietnam to visit the caves of the Phong Nha Karst. This journey into the Karst’s windcarved teeth resounds with the traditional songs of Nguyen’s guides, whose melodies produce the OOOOOOOO that echoes through narratives woven together around it as a visual and sonic spine: the story of Nguyen’s Uncle Van, an opportunistic businessman who traded in Vietnamese porcelain vessels; her comingofage as a child with missing teeth, and the material and mineral histories of the veneers that eventually completed her American Smile; the plastic paradise of the manmade island of Forest City, a simulacrum of natural beauty kept uncannily bright and lush by the flow of global investment capital; and, behind it all, a retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that supplies what the original parable lacked: an understanding of fantasy’s role in the construction of a sublime. In O’s antiallegory, the personal and geopolitical sit uncomfortably alongside one another. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. The uncanny naturalism of Nguyen’s zirconium veneers reflect Forest City’s manicured paradise. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the play of language across scales: how it rebounds between our stories of self and the semantic regimes of global capital alike.

Asian & Asian American Studies. Vietnamese American. Women’s Studies. Art. Hybrid.