Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) is pleased to announce Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, the first solo museum exhibition for New York and Los Angeles-based artist Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990), featuring a recent video installation, photographs, a site-specific architectural intervention, and the artist’s first public art commission in the form of a billboard located in Houston’s Midtown neighborhood during the month of January 2023.

The exhibition is built around the titular video, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who is taken in by a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a way to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances. Anchored in the visual and political context of the Vietnamese community of Poland—which is comprised of both Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain and Southerners who came in the long aftermath of the Vietnam War—Nguyen’s video reckons with the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime. Featuring voiceovers (in Polish, Vietnamese, and English), culled from writing on revolutionary practice by the likes Hannah Arendt, Ulrike Meinhof, and Mao Zedong among others, the work is a melodious inquiry into the power of collectivity versus the peril of the clique, one that identifies youth culture as a critical site of revolutionary power. IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS probes the uncomfortable space between propaganda and protest, revolutionary rhetoric and its commoditization.

In addition to Nguyen’s video work, the exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s highly-staged, close-up photographs depicting assemblages of both natural and synthetic materials. The artist captures moments “of becoming or unbecoming” liminal spaces in which an image is nearly, but not quite, recognizable as depicting a particular thing. This strategy is rooted in Nguyen’s interest in the processes by which we differentiate objects—and ourselves—from the world around us.

CAMH’s presentation will also include an architectural intervention formed onsite within the exhibition in direct response to the gallery space. Offsite, it will also feature Nguyen’s first public art project in the form of a commercial billboard located in the Midtown neighborhood of Houston. The billboard will be on view January 2–29, 2023. Like Poland, Houston is a key site in the post-Vietnam War diaspora, and currently holds the U.S.’s largest population of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans outside of California. Central to both moving image and photographic work is an understanding of the contingency of identity formation in relation to visual culture.

Nguyen’s solo exhibition continues CAMH’s longstanding commitment to supporting the work of artist’s early in their careers, as well as the institution’s mission to engage Houston communities beyond the Museum.

Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS is co-organized by Myriam Ben Salah, Executive Director and Chief Curator, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and Sohrab Mohebbi, Director, SculptureCenter. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH)’s presentation is organized by Rebecca Matalon, Curator.

For more information, visit CAMH.ORG.

CAMH’s presentation of Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS is supported in part by J. Patrick Collins.

Diane Severin Nguyen's first public art commission project, which takes place in conjunction with the exhibition, is funded in part by the City of Houston via the Houston Arts Alliance.

Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS has been made possible by the patrons, benefactors and donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund: Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Sissy and Denny Kempner, MD Anderson Foundation, Rea Charitable Trust, Louisa Stude Sarofim, The Sarofim Foundation, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.