S
n g ô ´
Sông
verb , to live; to remain alive
ex: “I will not forget as long as I live.”
–Oxford Languages
Ocean Vuong
Toledo Museum of Art
Theology
Do you remember when I tried to be good. It was a bad time.
So much was burning without a source.
I’m sorry I was so young.
I didn’t mean it.
It’s just this thing is heavy. How could anyone hold all of it & not melt.
I thought gravity was a law, which meant it could be broken.
But it’s more like a language. Once you’re in it you never get out. A fool, I climbed out the window just to look at the stars.
It was too dark & the crickets sounded like people I know saying something I don’t.
I think I had brothers.
Think I heard them crying once, then laughing, until the laughing was just in my head.
That’s how it is here: leaky.
One day, while crossing the creek, I met a boy. Lips red as a scraped knee.
When our eyes met, he gasped. Then raised his rifle.
That’s how I found out I was a squirrel.
That’s how I lost my tail, the only thing I was great at.
I don’t know what my name is but I can feel it.
A throbbing in the blood.
Last night I heard a voice & climbed to the tallest branch, so high I forgot all the rules. It was like being skinned into purpose. Below me was a rectangle the man had been digging all night. I watched him a long time, his body a question mark unraveling. When the light grew pink, the man stopped. Others, in black coats, gathered around him.
I know I was put here for a reason, but I spend most days just missing everybody.
The man lowered a box into the slot he had dug.
As if pushing a coin into a giant machine. That must be how they pay to be here.
Still Life: a day in a nail salon in 2009
I started taking photographs during my freshman year at community college. My friend, a bass player in a local punk band, had just gotten a 2006 Nikon D-80 and asked me to document their shows, which took place in dingy Connecticut basements and dive bars up and down I-91. After weeks of shooting direct flash on the edges of sweaty mosh pits, my back against a wall, I grew to see a kind of magic inside the frame, one I would understand only more fully as a writer: that though a work of art can be bolstered by context, there is just as much narrative propulsion, sometimes more so, when information is omitted—much like how haikus function via compression, images suddenly more luminous when isolated. The thirty-five-millimeter prime lens cleaved the world away, leaving the viewer to fill in the world outside the frame with their own fictions. Why is it, upon seeing certain photographs, that I can also hear them, can smell the scent in their rooms, sometimes even the words spoken, the timbre, the way a place hums between the sounds it makes?
Three years later, on a whim, I borrowed my friend’s Nikon and turned the lens on my family. On a sweltering day in July 2009, home for summer break after my first year at Brooklyn College, I brought the Nikon to my mother’s nail salon to shoot the employees (my mother, Rose, my aunt Sen, and their friend, Phuong) as they worked, fed themselves, cared for my infant cousin, Sara, while they laughed or sat staring out the windows in moments of boredom and idleness. At one point, in a moment of serendipity, my cousin Victor stopped by, hours after his release from a two-month stint in rehab. I had hoped to string the project into a series, having been inspired by Walker Evans's Alabama sharecropper photos with James Agee and the documentary work of William Gedney and Gordon Parks. I shot for a single day in the salon, hoping to return in the fall to document the store in another season. But three months later, with the historic recession sweeping its scythe across
the country, my mother declared bankruptcy, sold her business, and everything outside those frames vanished overnight.
A week after being asked to photograph those punk shows, I visited my community college library and started looking at photo books. This was where I discovered other touchstones like Fan Ho, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Corky Lee, Richard Billingham, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, William Christenberry, Larry Fink, and Helen Levitt. One such book was Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection , a 1999 survey that utilized subgenres as its organizing principle. Upon encountering the still life section, with its expected sequence of agrarian production, Roman facades, and objets d’art, including Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, I came upon what at first appeared to be a smashed bust. I soon discovered, upon reading the caption, that it was actually the head of an unknown Vietnamese man, shot in the mouth and decomposing in a field during the war in Vietnam.
Taken by war photographer Don McCullin, the photo was called Decomposed Face of a Dead North Vietnamese Soldier, Hue, 1968 (the year my mother was born). I resisted the urge to look away and spent a few moments studying the face, its contours ripped apart by the bullet’s velocity, the severe close-up exposing the man’s poor teeth, revealing his lack of access to dental care during war, colonialism, and famine. I then looked out the library’s windows, where the opulent autumnal light from a pine grove was dappling the wooden tables, and closed the book.
Why did the mouth, contorted by the bullet, as if pried open by a finger, bring to mind the image of children making mocking “faces” on playgrounds? Why did it feel like war was a perennial joke the dead play on the living? Why does the dead man’s mouth look so
much like laughter? I ask now what I did not know to ask then: if it were an American GI with his face split open, rotting, would I have encountered it while perusing a survey of still lifes in an art book? I wonder if it would have ever been taken in the first place, and at such close, evidentiary range. However one feels about war photography—there are long-argued reasons and detractions to its purpose—I’m interested in how art “survives,” and further, how the archival process so often becomes a troubled medium of situated reification. Though I’m sure the dated book no longer reflects the curatorial vantages of the ICP, the anthology nonetheless raises an important historical question: Under what parameters, and by whom, does a racialized corpse get aestheticized as a still life? Among shots of roosters, driftwood, legs of ham, succulent peaches and apples, quintessential Renaissance motifs from which the still life gained traction (as evidence of wealth), here lies, in grotesque displacement, the head of a man fighting the unlawful invasion of his country by an imperial power. Since the semiotic code of an index influences the meaning of an object, what would happen, for example, if this photo was placed under “portraits” or “military industrial artifacts” or “autopsies” or, to borrow from another section of that very book, “Everyday Life?”
It is not uncommon for Vietnamese American children to see themselves in media as corpses, often so mangled as to be indiscernible from one another, as it was the time I clicked, at fifteen, on a Wikipedia link and was blasted with a digitally enlarged photo of the My Lai massacre—the pooling blood, the fingers, the toes, bits of shredded underwear—to say nothing of the hundreds of Vietnamese corpses replicated in Hollywood war films. Looking back, I wonder if my desire to photograph the nail salon was a subconscious impulse, after encountering McCullin’s photo, to see the Vietnamese faces that fed me, the ones I kissed, the brows I wiped of sweat while they worked, alive. The camera, then,
became a near hallucinatory tool (a wand?) to replicate the living as they moved through time. How else to say to each other, live, live, live but to press the shutter again and again, creating one’s own proof of such miracles? The evidentiary nature of death in war then becoming the evidence of a people having survived that very war. I am here, we might say, because the faces in these photos, the ones with names my mouth was taught to hold, did not become a corpse documented by a photographer on assignment.
I look back on that single day in 2009 and wish I had composed these shots differently, wish I was bolder, had known more, possessed more courage, was at ease with the release button. Even in one day, I know I missed so much. Such regrets are only compounded by distance, the past irretrievable, yes—but perhaps even more cruelly—it’s immovable. But if image making, as Moriyama says, is articulating one’s desire for the world, then if nothing else, I wanted the people in those frames to be as they were, even if one of them, my mother, is no longer anywhere else but in these pictures.
Feeling bereft and seeking a contrived sense of closure art so often affords, I interlaced this photo essay with frames of my brother, Nicky, and our shared life in New England, all taken in a single week in July 2023, fifteen years later. The illusion of form more gratifying than the reality of chaos, I sequenced these photos to extend that single lost day in 2009 into a kind of “time accordion,” mimetic of how memory works—as interruption, hauntings, myths—but also as things that leach through the imagined borders we make of the years. In this way, I hope to regard time as a collaborator rather than the agent of erasure it’s so often claimed to be. Whether we want them to or not, memories survive. In photographs, they survive in spite of us. They remind us that a “still life” is also, if only in the frame’s fictive propulsion, still life.
—Ocean Vuong
Titles
2–3. Connecticut River during wildfire, 2023
6. garage door, 2023
7. Mom putting on makeup, 2009
8. Mom’s desk, 2009
9. voucher, 2009
10. mini fridge, 2023
11. Phuong and Mom, 2009
12–13. Nicky in the grass, 2023
14. customer entering, 2009
15. pedicures, 2009
16. “don’t look at me , ” 2023
17. Mom counting tips, 2009
18. Nicky waiting for Mom’s break, 2009
19. Jesus through the keyhole, 2023
20–21. city during wildfire, 2023
22. Nicky before his shift, 2023
23. crawfish, 2023
24. Victor stopping by after rehab, 2009
25. offerings for unknown dead Vietnamese man taken by Don McCullin, 2023
26. petroleum tanks, 2023
27. front altar, 2009
28–29. telephone wires, 2023
30. Nicky in blue, 2009
31. wounded tree, 2023
32. Phuong and Mom, 2009
33. Mom and Nicky, 2023
34. former gas station, 2023
35. Rose in the mirror, 2009
36–37. Nicky in bed, 2023
39. self-portrait on 18th birthday with borrowed Nikon, 2008
Published in conjunction with the gallery display From Asia to the World: Ancient to Contemporary Art, exclusively at the Toledo Museum of Art, April 20, 2024–June 29, 2025
All rights reserved. Except for legitimate excerpts customary in review of scholarly publications and that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law, no part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the written permission of Ocean Vuong.
Published by
The Toledo Museum of Art 2445 Monroe Street P.O. Box 1013
Toledo, Ohio USA 43697–1013
Tel. (419) 255-8000 www.toledomuseum.org
Printed and bound at the University of Toledo, Department of Art, Toledo, Ohio.
Front cover: Mom and Nicky, 2023
Back cover: Connecticut River during wildfire, 2023
