Opening Reception: Thursday 12 February, 7–10PM
Throughout his multidisciplinary practice, Alvin Luong uses strategies such as reenactment and reconstruction to recoup moments from the past and to cast them anew against the conditions of contemporary life. Luong’s new film, DEPHINITELY PARADISE (2026), stages the artist’s first meeting with Lan Thiệu Nguyen, a former refugee from Vietnam who resettled to the United States by way of Pulau Bidong, an island once the epicentre of the refugee crisis following the end of the American-Vietnam War. Situated within an installation of steel rebar sculptures and frottage works, Luong’s film pursues the analogies between Bidong’s refugee histories and the rehabilitated corals cultivated there today for export, often to many of the same countries where the refugees resettled. By collapsing spaces of life and death, and folding multiple geographies into intimate encounter, Luong’s exhibition offers a space that is neither origin nor destination, where the complexity of displacement and the fullness of human experience can be held without the need for resolution.
