Soy! Soy! Soy!

The City Gallery features place-based work by local artists, which often involves landscapes of familiar rivers and parks or nearby urban neighborhoods. While the concept of place entails buildings, streets, and landmarks, it is also inescapably bound by culture. The shape of a roof, the colors of a wall, and the neckline on a blouse are all created within a set of cultural norms and aesthetics. 

When those ideas and images intersect with another culture, normal is renegotiated. Bicultural Indiana artists Mailinh Hồ and Chanya Ruby (Pim) situate a search for the self and the spiritual through a lens that distorts place and person while drawing from their respective Vietnamese and Thai American cultures. 

She’s Done, by Chanya Ruby (Pim). Oil on canvas. 40” x 34”

Pim transforms portraits with vivid, iridescent skin tones and distorts facial features with carnival mirror-like proportions. Culture can exaggerate another’s norms until they appear as caricatures and tropes— physical appearance, skin color, and dress can be reduced to exotic, out-of-context symbols. Pim’s portrayal of feminine figures plays with this discomfort in the nausea of “Green Means Yuck!” and in “Angel Child,” which features a young woman dressed as a child and holding a classic American Girl Doll, with an expression between devious and conspiratorial.

Returning, by Mailinh Hồ. Oil on canvas. 40” x 50”

Mailinh creates a similarly unsettling tone, giving realistic forms deeply blank expressions and ghostly qualities. “Returning,” with its matching family dressed in white, floating on an empty river, could just as easily be a trip back home as it could be a journey between this world and the next. Cool, washed tones contrast deep, blood reds, leaving the viewer to merge the story of the subject’s emotional state and physical presence.

Green Means Yuck! by Chanya Ruby (Pim). Oil on canvas. 24”x 19”

As students at the Herron School of Art and Design and through their lived experience, Pim and Mailinh experienced a regular aspect of belonging to more than one culture: the practice of viewing yourself through different perspectives. While you can represent yourself and your culture, it may be received differently than intended by the culture in which you live. That which is strange to you is familiar to another, and vice versa.

“Where are you from?”— the question that may unearth sweet memories of a hometown can also plague those labeled as foreign because of their ethnic and cultural background. This question can be answered with a place, but it can encompass everything from the legacies of spiritualism to what you eat for breakfast. Mailinh and Pim explore the place that exists within and between cultural crossroads.

Faye, by Mailinh Hồ. Oil on canvas. 30” x 42”

“SOY! SOY! SOY!” by Mailinh Hồ and Pim is on display in the Harrison Center’s City Gallery for December. The exhibit can be viewed in person by appointment and in our online gallery, where all pieces are available for purchase.