Hồng-Ân Trương

Hồng-Ân Trương is an artist who primarily uses photography and video to explore immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. Her work engages with the concept that politics is the struggle for equal recognition within society, with aesthetics at the core of this battle. Starting with the premise that memory is political, her projects examine structures of time, memory, and the production of knowledge by engaging with archival materials, individual and collective narratives, and histories that span cultural and national borders.

Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions at the International Center for Photography (NY), Art in General (NY), Fundación PROA (Buenos Aires), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul, Turkey), City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), Smack Mellon (NY), the Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, NC), The Kitchen (NY), Nhà Sàn (Hanoi), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC), EFA Project Space (NY), and Leslie Tonkonow Gallery (NY), among others. In 2013 she was the recipient of an Art Matters Grant, a Franconia Sculpture Park Jerome Fellowship, and a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship. She was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2015. In 2017 she was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for a solo show at Lump Gallery in Raleigh, NC. She was a Southern Constellations Fellow at the Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC) in 2015 and an artist in the Open Sessions Program at The Drawing Center (New York) in 2016-2017. She was included in the New Orleans triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp in 2017-2018. Her collaborative work with Hương Ngô was exhibited in Being: New Photography 2018, the most recent edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography series. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, The Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic, among others. Her work has been discussed and featured in several publications, including Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, edited by Lan Duong, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Mariam B. Lam, and Kathy Nguyen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), and Refugee Passages: War, Empire, Gifts of Freedom by Mimi Thi Nguyen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

Her social practice projects include a collaboration with Hương Ngô, Jina Valentine, and Heather Hart called All Rise, which was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016, and an ongoing project with Hương Ngô called And And And – Stammering: An Interview, which was most recently performed at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas in 2018.

Hồng-Ân is based in Durham, North Carolina where she is an activist and a teacher. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.