Ocean Vuong: Sống
“The photograph invites true study, the frame fixing the world in place so that myth and truth accrue within our gaze. In this way, the image offers more of a person than what was first attainable at first glance. The shutter goes from saying
yes, yes, yes
to
more,
more,
more.”
—Ocean Vuong
Writer and poet Ocean Vuong began taking photographs as a teenager. With a borrowed Nikon camera in hand, he captured intimate scenes in the nail salon where his mother worked for decades and documented the post-industrial landscapes and abandoned mills of Hartford, Connecticut, where his family settled after leaving Vietnam in the wake of the US war.
“Sống: Photographs by Ocean Vuong”, the artist’s first New York City exhibition, foregrounds working-class diasporic Vietnamese life through a photographic archive spanning nearly twenty years. The photographs on view echo the narratives from Vuong’s literary works by drawing attention to the quotidian and the deeply personal – Vuong’s brother’s shoes, home altars, a mother feeding her baby, an embrace between friends, an American flag.
“Sống”, which means “to live” in Vietnamese, includes several photographs taken in the aftermath of Vuong’s mother’s death in 2019 that frame the evolving relationship with his brother, Nicky, as they mourned and navigated their immense grief. Vuong writes, “I started taking photographs as a way to make our lives legible to my mother. And my mother’s looking made the elegy legible in my work.”
One of the most celebrated American writers of our time, Vuong invites visitors to gaze through his aperture and offers a meditation on loss, labor, and kinship through the refugee condition.
The gallery will be closed on Thursday, November 26 and Friday, November 27.
Accessibility note: The gallery is on the first floor and is accessible to the public. All gender restrooms are available. For accessibility needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.
About the Artist
Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than two million copies in 41 languages. He is also the author of The Emperor of Gladness, an Oprah Book Club selection and finalist for the Dublin Literary Award. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, his books of poems include Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. He was the 2019-20 A/P/A Institute at NYU Artist-in-Residence.
Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. In 2026, he will serve as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
He currently splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a professor in modern poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.