James Nguyen has used 800 shirts to tell a powerful story about colonialism, Australia and his family.
It’s a peculiar sight: about 800 white shirts hanging as if on a clothes line. With stains in the armpits and elsewhere, slightly different designs and stitching, they suggest something of the individuals who once wore them, but also something more significant.James Nguyen’s white shirts form a chain, “like connectivity between people, between lives”.
“The idea is that you button from one shirt to the other, so it’s kind of like a chain, like connectivity between people, between lives,” he adds of the work inBest known for video and performance art, 42-year-old Nguyen was born in Vietnam and his family came here as refugees after the war there. One of his early memories of life in Australia is holding on to the Hills Hoist in the backyard, swinging around on it alongside the washing; it used to be a quintessential part of growing up here.
“When we were putting the work together, we had to hand-stitch it together,” McSpedden says. “So it’s been a labour of love, but that feels really appropriate. James actually taught us all these wonderful stitching techniques [he was taught by his family]. He often gets his mum and his aunties to help him.”feels like several shows within one, each room dedicated to a different work with a different collaborator, including Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren and Chris Xu.
McSpedden says it asks us to think about coming together and how we create a gathering space between difference.
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