By The daughter of two survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodian Civil War and Vietnam War paid tribute to her family and community through art in her display now available to see at CSULB.
Created by Phung Huynh, “Pink Donut Boxes” is at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum.
Donut shops have a special connection with the Southeast Asian community, as the majority of them are Cambodian owned. Long Beach itself hosts the largest Cambodian population in the United States.
Huynh’s display features a collection of intimate portraits, delicately composed on iconic pink donut boxes to reflect the Cambodian and Vietnamese refugee experience.
Upon entrance to the main gallery, three portraits can be seen, featuring Huynh herself as a baby, one of her mother and one of her father.
Phung Huynh stands in front of her graphite portraits drawn on pink donut boxes, depicting herself as a baby and her mother on Oct. 1 at Kleefield Contemporary Art Museum. Huynh composed these portraits from her family’s resettlement photos, taken for documentation upon entering the United States. Photo Credit: Lauren Benson
The momentum to make this body of work came after a co-worker shared with Huynh an L.A. Times article linking pink donut boxes and Cambodian refugees.
After completing all of the portraits, Huynh reached out to other members of the Cambodian community to interview them and complete their portraits.
“It’s always been in the back of my mind to make work about it, but it was such a traumatic experience for my family,” Huynh said. “I had struggles about if I was going to exploit my family by making work about it and it took me 20 years to decide that I was really going to do this.”
Huynh said she had completed a baker’s dozen of these portraits and felt that this was an appropriate place to pause as it isn’t a commercial entity to her. The intimate depictions are created with careful intentions from the artist.
Now on display at the CSULB campus, Huynh said that she was especially honored to share the work to the university’s public.
“Having the art situated with students, like people from the Cambodian American community, who really want to be empowered and have agency in writing their life narrative – I am really inspired by that and feel lucky that my art gets to interface with communities like that,” Huynh said.
Along with being an artist dedicated to sharing the stories of her community, Huynh is also professor of art at Cal State Los Angeles, teaching drawing and painting.
Working as an educator was something she had thought about since the beginning of her life.
As a kid, Huynh said that she was attracted to all creative endeavors and inspired by popular culture like anime. She fondly remembers drawing all day with her neighbor, a fellow Cambodian refugee who resettled in Paris and then came to Chinatown in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
In high school, Huynh got a scholarship for a high school program at ArtCenter College of Design and began taking classes.
Huynh’s journey into becoming an artist wasn’t aligned with the career path that her parents were pushing for. They encouraged her to pursue traditional careers like a lawyer or doctor.
When Huynh was first enrolled at the University of Southern California, she was a pre-med major but continued taking art classes.
Huynh eventually realized how impactful creating art could be and decided to go all-in by pursuing the power of honoring her community through her work.
Now, while teaching her own technique, Huynh said that she attempts to “smuggle in a social justice lens when looking at art.”
She seeks to portray women of color and the working class in galleries, since white, male and upper class is the traditional canon for portraiture.
It is part of her desire to connect with students who came from refugee, immigrant, working class families and first-generation students who grew up like her.
“Ironically, my parents, who went through so much to survive was a motivating factor, I only have this one life and my parents went through all this for me to be able to do more than just survive,” said Huynh.
“Pink Donut Boxes” Exhibit A is part of the Kleefeld’s current exhibition, “Against Monoculture,” which explores the relationship of art and activism in connection to food justice.
It will be on display until Dec. 12, 2024, and include an open forum to hear artist and scholars discuss the current fall exhibitions almost every Tuesday at noon.
