Ming Ying Hong

“Bits of memories. Some told. Some photographed. Some recorded. Some invented.” Pastels, acrylic on canvas, 81”x145”, 2025

This is the first in a new body of work, exploring the tensions that exist in memory and historical record. My father, a refugee from Vietnam, has always been a storyteller full of winding contradictions and looping tales of escape and heroism. Inspired by archival research on the Vietnam War with the stories of my family, the work traces the ruptures that emerge when historical record and lived memory diverge—seeking complicated emotional truths that resist the neutrality and limitations of official documentation.

Filtered through my lens as someone who identifies as both a first- and second-generation immigrant (I was born in China and grew up in the States), the work is a collection of real and invented fragments, among them:
·      walls that function as literal and emotional borders
·      a boat—flimsy, smoking—yet sturdy enough to sail to a new home
·      the cramped apartments that swelled with my family
·      grass, since a perfect lawn is the most American of desires
·      and American Progress, because it is the ghost that lingers in history and the present day