Projected on the wall across from the entrance of Radcliffe’s Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery is Hồng-An Trương’s short film something that loves—something that lives (2024–2025). Two floor cushions are placed side by side before the wall. The video, which loops after thirty-three minutes in the dimly lit room, instantly welcomes me to join something ongoing.
In the film, we see a collection of moments between North Carolina–based community organizers Ngọc Loan Trần and Nadeen Bir and their mothers. Together they laugh, cook, eat, and remember. Text from a poem by Trần punctuates the silent piece, which is divided into three chapters, the last of which is titled “Part III: This is a poem about how to leave everything.” In this chapter, Trần, who is Vietnamese, and Bir, who is Palestinian, place photographs from their family archives into frame by sliding them onto the table or over the grass. Viewers watch but cannot hear as Trần, Bir, and their mothers point to a specific something or someone. This marks the first of many strategic choices Trương makes to evoke the sense that something has been taken away and, perhaps from this loss, something else grows.
“With love from your Vietnamese sisters” marks Trương’s return to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, this time with a solo exhibition curated by Caitlin Julia Rubin. Each of the works responds to a scrapbook that was crafted by the South Vietnam People’s Committee for Solidarity with the American People and gifted to Black feminist philosopher and former political prisoner Angela Davis in 1972. Housed in the Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, the contents of this scrapbook—Vietnamese articles reporting on Davis’s trial and messages of support for her—echo throughout the space.
A professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Trương roots her practice in archival materials, uncovering connections between seemingly disparate histories and struggles. Her work breaks down the walls that isolate socially constructed binaries—particularly the wall between the aesthetic and the political—as it presents viewers with an undeniable bridge.
We shall remain (2025), a rosy sheer voile that drapes onto the gallery floor, continues to challenge the aesthetic versus political distinction. Just visible is the solvent transfer of various ephemera sent to Angela Davis. At first I read only titles in bold, such as “The Occupied Homeland” and “Naivy-Tirza Women’s Prison.” The technique Trương used to transfer the images is rarely exact and often blurry. In order to decipher the material, I had to play with light and shadow until it revealed itself to me in fragments. At my tallest, I could make out the middle of a stanza by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Ziad, which read “We starve, / Go naked, / Sing songs,” crouching later to finish, “And fill the streets, / With demonstrations / And the jails with pride.” The transfer, which runs down the middle of the fabric horizontally, insists that viewers search for its information.
From behind the curtain, I could see Trương’s series of carbon transfer prints on mirrors. The titles of these works—To consider your politics as my own (2025), With death, harmony through difference (2025), and Hai con người, một lý tưởng (Two people one ideal) (2025)—communicate with clarity a way of thinking that is reminiscent of Davis’s philosophy. In her 2016 book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis insists, “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.”
The titles are only a continuation of the works themselves, which offer a concrete means for visitors to see themselves reflected alongside changemakers of various backgrounds as they consider, deeply, what solidarity has meant to the ongoing pursuit of liberation.
Trương is dedicated to unpredictable practices: filming in Super 8, printing carbon gelatin tissue onto mirrors, and dissolving toner onto wispy fabric. It is the delicacy required that speaks to the tenderness of the subject matter itself. In the face of injustice, to radically hold on to hope is to hold on to community—especially across differences.
“With love from your Vietnamese sisters” is on view through December 19 at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA.
