Artist
Hien Hoang
Hien Hoang was born in Quang Ninh, Vietnam and currently lives in Hamburg, Germany.
She graduated from the Rheinmain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden with a bachelor’s degree in communication design with a focus on photography. She is currently working on various projects and completing a master’s degree in photography at the University of Applied Sciences (HAW) in Hamburg.
Hien is interested in identity, clichés and symbols. She has investigated these topics in various projects and in different ways. She experiments with arrangement, staging and installation in order to place ordinary objects and scenes in a new context and thus symbolically recharge them.
Asia Bistro
The first time I saw an Asia Bistro was during my exchange semester in Berlin, Germany. It was a small bistro near the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm Church. To this day, I still think, the taste of those 5 crispy rolls which I ordered, was actually what triggered me to explore the topic about food and the representation of Asian cultures in Germany. And five years later, I started a project with the same name: “Asia Bistro”.
Salmon with slit eyes, rice paper on the tongue, and noodle twisted around a halfly sliced face - in this photographic work, I created chaotic food scenes which lie on the thin line between aesthtic and tastefulness and disgust and nonedible. By doing so, I want to provoke the cliché and the common concept of the Asian cultures in the West. Why is a stirred duck filet considered as “exotic” here? Why can a person eat fried noodle happily and later yell at me with “get back to China”? Why are people with vietnamese heritage portrayed as a good example for immigrant in Germany but then my aunt was being treated like a child in the office? Does being Asian-like mean to be polite and friendly?
“Asia Bistro” can be seen as a photographic document about my process of questioning and understanding the conflictual perceptions and stereotypes about Asian people in Germany.
As extension parts of “Asia Bistro”, I also created various performances and installations, in which I expressed my thoughts about this topic with other artistic mediums. “Made in rice” is one of those projects and will be screened in May in front of the japanese tea house, in Platen un Blomen Park Hamburg.
The curatorial team of the 8th Triennale has selected five emerging Futures artists in the field of photography who have particularly caught their eye:
What is Hien Hoang’s recipe? For me, it’s the mix of ingredients: Using still-life photography, surrealism and performance, she addresses clichés and prejudices about Asia. Her photos are bursting with exotic beauty, but a closer look reveals abysses that shake up ways of seeing and thinking. (nominated by Stephanie Bunk)
Engaging flows of history and social relation, Euridice Kala deploys the photographic image as a central means of meaning-making. Her artistic practice mines the fraught memories of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial-era Mozambique through the form of installations, performances, and publications. She is invested in the capacity of the archive to generate conceptual possibilities, and pursues these avenues from a Black feminist African perspective. (nominated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo)
Marco Kesseler is a UK-based British photographer with an interest in portrai- ture and the social stories of food security and agricultural infrastructures. Kesseler has a profoundly tender presence as a photographer. From his quiet portraits of daily life in Belarus in the run up the 2015 presidential election to his recent series on the role of seasonal work in the UK largely fulfilled by migrant workers whose labour is likely to be unprotected by Brexit legislation, the quiet resolve of Kesseler’s photographs resist dominant narratives of place, nationhood and nativist independence. (nominated by Gabriella Beckhurst)
Johanna Terhechte is exceptionally curious about the world and driven to undertake challenges. She is a thoughtful artist and a compassionate human being, two underrated character traits in artists. (nominated by Rasha Salti)
Laura Van Severen is a Belgian photographer based between Barcelona and Ghent. She is a promising talent who has, in her latest projects, taken a thorough look at the transformation of landscape and environment. Strata (2020) is an investigation of the effect of landfill and waste management, having traveled to Spain, Belgium, Romania, Portugal and the Netherlands. In this series, Laura maps a representative selection of altered ecosystems that are the pure consequence of our abusive system of consumption. With aesthetic sensibility, she blends artistic and journalistic approaches, pointing at harsh realities of our times with poetic means. With this nomination, I’d like to reinforce her courage working on complex, research-based photographic projects, as well as supporting her persistent aspiration to reconnect us with nature and with each other through diverse exhibition formats. (nominated by Cale Garrido)