ARTIST STATEMENT
With the Vietnam War dividing the country in two between North and South, Communist Vs Non-Communist it was a time of danger, heightened anxiety, and suspicion. My grandmother Ngueyn Thi Vo lived in Da Nang, a Southern Vietnamese city and ran a grocery store to make a living for her and my father’s family. Under this guise hid her true allegiance to the Communist’s of Vietnam, but showed her loyalty and strong will to her country and an end to American Occupation in Vietnam. Her store was used as a base for North Vietnamese Intelligence to exchange information, supplies, and other contraband. Eventually she was caught by the South Vietnamese government and tortured for information before she was bailed out. She was labeled a traitor.
There’s an unspoken secrecy within Vietnamese families that followed us on the boats from Vietnam. To this day my family struggles to ever go into detail about their lived experience of the war. I often felt this disconnect between myself and them that conversation could not remedy. When I felt the need to understand this disconnect instead of asking my family, I asked for their photo albums. Suddenly the pieces of my life would come together, the love story of my parents in New York City would unfold, what my grandmother dad always talked about looked like, and my sister’s first communion.
After the death of my paternal grandmother in 2021 I was faced with an unimaginable amount of grief. My father never spoke of how he felt about his mother passing away. I ultimately went back to those same photos from my childhood which became my film “Confessions of a Cool Girl.” Arranging these photos and creating moving images from them spoke to the same disconnect I had felt before, now becoming my only form of catharsis that could speak to this broken part of myself, my family, and my home.
FILM SCREENING
Venue : Screening Room at Lesley University Hall (1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA).
Event Date : 5/31/2025
Time : 4:30 PM EST
Register Here (Free)
FILM STILLS
ARTIST BIO
Anhkim Chi Dang is a Transgender Vietnamese American Artist based in Boston. She was raised in the suburbs of North Jersey with her two parents and sister. As a descendant of the earliest wave of Vietnamese War refugees who became American Citizens, her work is an investigation of identity, generational trauma and healing. Using various forms of image making, her mission is to create a contemporary view of the Vietnamese American diaspora to help speak to the community about feelings of softness, grief, home, and unfamiliar nostalgia. Her film “Confessions of a Cool Girl”, was a semifinalist in the Student Academy Awards for experimental film(2023). Her work has been screened in the Huntington Beach Cultural Cinema Showcase (2021) and the Transfiguration International Film Festival in Providence Rhode Island (2024).