Inheritance - West Space
I was drawn to West Space’s current exhibition Inheritance with the promise of divination; artist Phuong Ngo guiding participants to ask yes/no questions to be answered by the French Indochinese coins of his maternal grandmother. While I don’t particularly believe in fortune telling or any other similarly woo woo aligned practices, I do however believe in using these exercises as tools of reflection to better understand the self. I sat down with Phuong and asked the coins my first question: Am I on the right path, right now? and got what Phuong described as a ‘sarcastic no’ from the ancestors. I’m choosing to take this as their concern for my chosen career path in the arts, including my upcoming graduation from my Master’s degree with no immediate job prospects or leads of any kind. (I want a job!! I’m simply begging at this point!!) But anyway … I asked the coins a second question, and it appears the ancestors seem to think my love life is on the right track, so that’s some kind of consolation prize at least? I guess??
Inheritance’s main components are five tables. Three of which are replicas of tables sold by Ngo’s family in order to survive after the 1975 fall of Saigon, made from the reclaimed wood from the ancestral home in Vietnam which was demolished in 2016. The three marble tops (one round, one oval, one square) to these tables are ratchet strapped down to a moving trolley close to the entrance to the space. In a constant state of unrest and disorder, the tabletops will never be united with their wooden legs, the tables never to be quite complete. The tables can also never be reunited with their tops due to the posts jutting up through the empty frames. These disruptive posts hold the videos (also ratchet strapped) which are the other crucial element to this show. One video shows the divination coins, ringing between the bowl and plate, answering the questions asked of them, and answering the ringing of themselves being used live in the space. Another video shows Phuong’s mother using the coins to perform cao gío (guā shā) on his back. The third video again sees Phuong’s mother interacting with his body, slipping his paternal grandmother’s jade earrings into his ears. Material having its own memory is such an interesting concept to me, the wood from the ancestral home being reused in replicas of things that used to reside in that home, or the memory of the jade and marble which are porous materials that absorb the world that surrounds them. The jade earrings in the video have absorbed the oils from the skin of their previous wearers, so when Ngo wears them, he also then wears the physical presence of his ancestors and not just the jewellery.
The light from the windows is softened by the mosquito nets draped heavily in front of them. The nets have been sprayed with a dye made from the wood shavings from making the tables, the waste being reused as a stain. There was a performance element at the show’s opening which saw Ngo spray the nets with the dye after maintaining a stress pose behind the curtain. Reflective of the stress poses he was punished with as a child, on the very same melamine table on which we did the divination together, which was the dining table in his childhood home. Everything in this show talks to everything else in the room, decades upon decades of family, cultural, and personal history woven together to tell an intricate story. While I had ventured to the gallery initially for the divination practice, I was treated to an artist talk as a special bonus, as West Space was full to the brim of RMIT students who were visiting on an excursion. Hearing Ngo and curator Amelia Winata speak about these layers of history for an hour gave so much context for the exhibition; all the stories and histories of the objects in the room. You can also be treated to such a talk from artist and curator on the closing day of the exhibition, 7th of June from 2 - 4pm.