Albers' Assembly (2022-23)
Collage risograph print mounted on wood panels in artist’s frame
36 x 46 cm
The works appropriate Josef Albers’ Structural Constellation series with historical charts and data about the First Republic of Vietnam gathered by Pentagon agents or former Southern Vietnamese government archives. Albers created Structural Constellation from the 1950s to early 1960s, the same period when the First Republic of Vietnam (RVN) started its supportive circle in America and set its sovereignty foundation in the country’s Southern territories. While Albers brought America the modernist radicalism in the visual theory of color and composition, the Ngo brothers of the RVN navigated their color and structural theory of politics and governance. If the strict geometry of Albers rendered from the two-dimensional into a three-dimensional illusion, Ngo’s invented political ideologies also challenged and twisted the political norms of the Cold War.