Minh Ngoc Nguyen – Sour Sun

I initially started working on an idea for a book at the end of 2019. However, the direction quickly shifted once the pandemic hit and we found ourselves at the height of a perceived increase in racism against Asians at large.

As someone who was born and raised in Denmark, a country seemingly detached from racial discourse but not, the ramifications of these statistics and stories further amplified racial traumas within my family and me.

Confined to my small room under lockdown, with limited studio space and the inventory of my parents’ home, I began questioning the ways in which Western pop culture distils and portrays Asian culture and iconography, what is deemed as cultural signifiers and how they have impacted my own understanding of ethnicity and national identity.

Through the semblance and semantics of commercial photography and contemporary still life, Sour Sun looks to examine Southeast-Asian shapes of consumerism, taste and fetishisation through the optics of a second-generation migrant born and raised in a Nordic country. By utilising post-internet photographic tropes, along with my personal ties and heritage to Southeast Asian visual cultures, the images attempt to deconstruct and re-constitute familiar objects and iconography from my surroundings.

Minh Ngoc Nguyen (b.1992), he/him) is a Copenhagen-born and based artist, who has a background in commercial photography. He graduated from Akademin Valand in Gothenburg with an MFA in 2018. His work revolves around the act and gimmicks of image-making while questioning the ways in which we approach national identity inscribed in visual pop culture.

Sour Sun is published by Heavy Books. Graphic design by Funch Studio.