chân trời foot of the sky
Archival pigment prints, two-way mirrored glass, neon.
2023

Using the visual play of two-way mirrors – reflecting, refracting and unsettling the viewer’s gaze – this installation expands the space of the airport corridor to feel boundless and borderless. Photographic panels serve as the background for play with light, mirror, and text. The panels were created from archival documents of Vietnamese refugees (at camps in the US and in Guam) that highlight moments of physical connection, agency, and radical joy while also pointing to the disciplined body under state authority. The images suggest the tension in our relationship with state power: between freedom and control; subordination and autonomy. The use of two-way mirror disrupts, fragments, and echoes parts of the image and text, suggesting both the power of state surveillance and the possibility for our collective evasion. The phrase written in a hybrid of English and Vietnamese, gặp nhau at the chân trời foot of the sky, in bright red neon, stretches across the space in between pieces of two-way mirror. While the phrase can be translated as “meet together at the horizon,” the word “horizon” is used in the neon as its literal meaning, “foot of the sky.”

An airport passageway has the potential to signify a home left behind for unfamiliar territories or to create a space in which belonging is claimed as a common good. While we might reach a physical destination, citizenship based on the authority of the nation often feels like a forever moving vanishing point upon the distant horizon. Pulling from their research on immigration history and sanctuary movements of protection, Ngô and Trương's installation reimagines the concept of citizenship and safe passage. The installation holds tension between acknowledging the power of the state to determine belonging while offering another possibility to reimagine how we might belong to one another.

This work was commissioned by the city of Chicago (led by Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA)) for the O’Hare Airport T5 Expansion: International Arrivals Corridor. It is part of Del Otro Lado/The Other Side, curated by Behar X Schachman. Click for more information. Photo credit: Patrick Pyszka, City of Chicago.