Hanh Thi Pham
b. 1954, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Self Portrait/Hairy/Pipe, 1985
Chromogenic print
Private collection

Expatriate Consciousness, 1991-1992
Chromogenic print
Private collection

As a refugee of the Vietnam War in the United States, Hanh Thi Pham is a trailblazing artist whose photographic installations and performances confront racism, colonialism, displacement, and identity. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pham’s work vigorously critiqued identitarian constructs of sexuality, ancestry, biological gender, and class, dismantling the naturalized myth of a fixed, monolithic identity.

Expatriate Consciousness shown here is part of a multi-layered installation of photographs, text, and mixed media, featuring Pham with her arm flexed in a "fuck you" gesture, embodying her complex and defiant identity as an artist, daughter, immigrant, lesbian, Vietnam War survivor, among others. This piece explores the lingering impact of colonialism on the Vietnamese psyche and the constraints of individual agency in addressing it. Notably, Four Thousand Year Revolution (1987 and 1995), a later work by Pham, incorporates social realist elements from Expatriate Consciousness to trace Vietnam’s historical and political development, asserting her anti-colonial, revolutionary stance.

Another work, Self Portrait / Hairy / Pipe, depicts Pham dressed in a white shirt with long black hair and a pipe to her lip. The pipe, which has traditionally been a masculine symbol of Western investigative inquiry and artistic conceptualism (“Ceci n'est pas une pipe”), interrupts and destabilizes the signification and orientalist reception of Vietnamese women as seamless fetish objects.