Alumnus Duy Hoàng '17 Featured in Group Exhibition and Festival

Alumnus Duy Hoàng '17 is featured in a group exhibition, Art Off-Screen, in New York and in The 2020 Festival Images Vevey in Switzerland. 

Organized by the founder of Neumeraki, Eileen Jeng Lynch, Art Off-Screen is an international exhibition of artwork and performances in outward-facing locations around the world, in hopes to bring together local communities on a global scale. “In response to pause orders during the pandemic, Art Off-Screen showcases works that can be viewed from the outside by the community, providing access to art beyond a computer screen, encouraging dialogues, amplifying voices, inspiring creativity, and sharing messages of hope and healing.” Lynch explained. “Employing a variety of mediums and sites, artists create new work and/or explore new directions as well as ways of how their art is seen or experienced. Artists address issues surrounding the pandemic, racial violence, social injustice, climate change as well as reflections on their artistic practices, among other topics.”

Hoàng’s piece, Greenshield Timeline, is located at 40°47'48.6"N,  73°57'08.6"W in New York. “The growth rate of 5mm/year, this patch of Greenshield lichen is an equivalent of my lifespan thus far and how many events, personally or globally, it has witnessed,” Hoàng said.

An off-site sculptural edition of this work is for sale and 20% of proceeds go to the Artist Relief Fund.

The exhibition releases new pieces biweekly and the last rollout is on September 26, 2020. Hoàng’s piece, Greenshield Timeline, opened September 12 and will run through October 10, 2020. There is also an upcoming live event to meet the artists of the exhibition via Zoom on September 30, 2020.

Hoàng is also featured in Vevey, Switzerland as part of The 2020 Festival Images Vevey.

The festival runs every two years for three weeks and is entirely free of charge. The festival features exclusive photography exhibitions on “façades, in parks, indoor exhibitions in unusual venues, and joint ventures with people who ensure Vevey’s status as a ‘city of images’ all year round,” as stated on their website. “Festival Images is a true open-air museum as well as a quality platform for national and international artists.”

Hoàng’s Vestigial Structure Series “diverts the ‘camera function’ of the Google Translate app, which allows you to photograph a text and get an instant translation. By gently turning his smartphone camera towards the lake, mountains, or trees, he reveals words hidden in our natural environment and invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the app interprets the shapes of branches or those drawn by the movement of water as Asian ideograms and therefore sees them as words. The app’s automatic translation into English generates random words that appear to be in perfect harmony with their surroundings.” 

This series is displayed near to where it was created during the artist’s residency in La Becque where this project was born. 

You can see Hoàng’s Vestigial Structure in person at Quai Roussy using this map and referring to number 18, or online. The festival opened on September 5 and runs through –September 27, 2020. 

Hoàng is an interdisciplinary artist born in Vietnam, currently residing in New York City. Moving to the US at a young age, the transition demanded his attentiveness to the minutiae of the new habitat in order to adapt to those small shifts, and therefore make sense of the much larger foreign environment. Hoàng dissects his surroundings, then reconstructs anew; overwhelmingly accumulating his working/living space with numerous findings and responsive-makings. This nesting process embodies an obsessive impulse to continually search for 'home,' and pursuits to understand how things are connected to each other, despite their contrasts. From the mundane to the phenomena, from the potential of growth to the inevitability of decay, from different times and places separated by many types of distances, we are all imminently intertwined.

'Greenshield Timeline' by Duy Hoàng '17 in 'Art Off-Screen'