This Land is Your Land

New Victimhood by Diane Severin Nguyen

Diane Severin Nguyen is a Vietnamese American artist born in 1990 in Carson, California. She works with found objects and organic matter to make the amalgam sculptures featured in her photographs and time-based media. Her pictures evoke an “architecture of emotions,” but also fundamental bodily functions. Over the years, Nguyen has experimented with chromogenic prints, capturing detailed close-ups of small-scale sculptures that often appear plant-based, coagulating, metallic, and wet. Transient prosthetic lighting, such as the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, or fire, is also used so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements and the lighting changes. As a result, she captures an ineffable moment during a state of transformation, often of the moment of instability before the matter falls apart. Additionally, her short films expand her photographic moments into historical contexts, such as portraying trash-inundated landscapes in Vietnam in her film Tyrant Star. Nguyen currently works between Los Angeles and New York and has had many solo and duo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and New York.



The objects we see in New Victimhood might be fishing nets and plastic ties; they are unspecific in a way that evokes an emotional response about the impact that human-made plastics have on the environment. The bright blues suggest bioluminescence, which is sometimes used by animals as a form of self-defense. Both beautiful and a signal of threat, the effect might make us wonder just who the predators are.

Recycling in Southeast Asia

What happens to plastic once we put it in our recycling bins? Each year, hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are shipped around the world to southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia for the labor-intensive process of recycling. However, only 9% of this plastic is actually recycled, the rest mostly ending up in landfills across South-East Asia or illegally incinerated, releasing highly poisonous fumes. Despite these South-Asian countries' protests and threats to send the trash back, crates full of often hazardous trash continue to pour into underdeveloped areas. A Malaysian government investigation found that waste from the UK, Australia, United States, and Germany was being sent into their country illegally by being falsely declared as other imports. Read more here. 

“It’s their waste so these countries should be responsible for it. To us, it’s an environmental injustice for poorer countries to take the waste of richer countries just because they don’t want to deal with it. So hopefully when their rubbish is sent back, finally these countries will be forced into action on their own doorstep.” - Beau Baconguis, Plastics Campaigner of GAIA Asia Pacific 




 

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