Interstates and Inner States: Howard Henry Chen

Abstract

Howard Henry Chen's artwork strides dyads: materialism/spirituality, East/West, and community/loneliness. Chen fled Việt Nam as a two-year-old with his parents in 1975, “a few weeks before the tanks rolled in,” as U.S.-based, lens-based non-profit organization Light Work describes Chen's departure. 1 Chen grew up in Pennsylvania and studied journalism and political science at Boston University; he studied photography at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and attended a graduate art program at Columbia College from 2003 to 2006. After 25 years in the United States, Chen first returned to Việt Nam in 2000 as a photographer on a U.S. Fulbright fellowship with a journalist's sense of sociopolitical shifts embedded in everyday stories and gestures. For more than a decade, he would continue to straddle worlds, the United States and Việt Nam, literally and metaphorically, staying in Việt Nam for three to eight months at a time to observe and to produce unsettling, uncanny work. His works are housed in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Light Work (New York), Post Vidai (Sài Gòn); he has exhibited at DIA PROJECTS (Sài Gòn, 2017), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2008), Angkor Photo Festival (Siem Reap, 2006), Fries Museum (Groningen, 2006), among other venues. For 15 years, he lived in Chicago, Illinois—“the most American of American cities,” as journalist and urban planner Pete Saunders calls this city in the middle of the United States. 2 Chen is caught mid-way between America and Asia, seen to represent a globalizing Việt Nam on international art markets while embodying Euro-American conceptual art training when in Việt Nam (there is no formal graduate level arts curriculum, yet a cutting-edge contemporary art scene thrives). Subsequently, given the unequal pull of dominant art worlds and criticism in general and its particular focus on Southeast Asia's twin traumas of modernity and war vestiges, Chen's work has been exhibited, taught, and collected most widely in North America. Astutely, the artist strategically positions himself as both insider and outsider in Asia and the Americas. In the midst of a global pandemic in October 2020, Howard Henry Chen wrote during our correspondence, “As befitting of a peripatetic refugee/artist life, I’m in between cities at the moment”—currently in Pennsylvania, he was planning to return to Chicago, then to Saì Gòn when COVID-19 hit. 3 Now, the whole world is in a state of liminality and in-betweenness.