Hanh Thi Pham, Outlaw Leadership, and the Role of Art
“Photographic installation artist” Hanh Thi Pham, as described by Elaine Kim in “‘Bad Women’: Asian American Visual Artists,” demands to be seen. Her artist statement, which is currently cataloged in Japan’s Fukuoka Art Museum, positions Pham as a non-binary, Vietnamese refugee with a “lesbian-defined revolutionary attitude,” (Q/DCA 98). Their many identities counter the values of “Amerikkka” which perpetuates economic, anti-immigrant, racist, patriarchal, and homo/transphobic violence against queer immigrants of color like Pham. Her art works with “Lesbian-specific imageries” to “explore metamorphic Asian identities,” which inevitably carries themes of war, diaspora and vulnerability, belonging, anti-assimilation, and rejecting Eurocentric values/ideals.
By photographing herself in ways that complicates stereotype, challenges Eurocentric norms, and rejects the “model minority” expectation — Pham weaponizes art so they can be seen. Describing the dehumanizing experience of being a Vietnamese refugee during the Vietnam war, Pham was forced to “surrender [her] given name, [her] real birth date and [her] original identity to comply with a set of requirements dictated by the United States government…(Q/DCA 98).
“The experience was like a death sentence upon me, for I was uprooted and forced into self-erasure,” (98).
Vietnamese. Refugee. Queer. Femme. Multiple aspects of Pham’s identity render her “other” in the eyes of white Americans, who view her through lenses clouded by stereotypes, assumptions, racist ideology, “Eurocentric morals, and compulsive heterosexuality,” (98). For Pham to exist in these photograph — self-determined — disrupts the images that are forced onto her body. In the tradition of “outlaw leadership,” which Pham views as the force that is most likely to “reshape the future, her photographs use autonomous visibility to confront structures of power that would otherwise render her invisible.
Pham specifically challenges Western approaches to gender and sexuality in her photograph installations. By photographing and exhibiting the free female body — a body that is otherwise relegated to the domestic sphere, reproduction, and patriarchal control — Pham “focuses on women and celebrates female sexual desire with images of her own nude body,” (Kim, 578). However, her photographs are not centering any kind of female sexuality, but one that is anti-imperialist, queer, and revolutionary in nature. To be seen, on their own terms, is at the core of Hanh Thi Pham’s creations. Indeed, “simple” survival and recognition is in itself an act of resistance.
