Faculty of Art

Photography

Kathy Nguyen

Public Access Radish

“Nhổ củ cải” or “Pluck the Radish” is a popular Vietnamese childhood fable about a man who cannot pull a radish from the ground. He asks each family member to assist him including his grandmother, daughter, dog, and cat to grab one another in order to pull the vegetable from the ground and they rejoice. In “Public Access Radish”, they are an attempt at creating staged scenes of traditions and rituals I remember from my childhood such as peeling spring roll paper or watching my mother and father work. My mother recalls the radish story as a long-running tradition of performing stage plays at home with her own family. In reference to that, I hope to compile more of these mundane routines into a longer video to one day make a debut as a 3 am television special that continues to repeat into the late night. The video contains an untranslated voice-over of my mother talking about her life and the significance of the collected casette tapes. Music for painting, music that she had compiled from the first years immigrating to Canada, music celebrating Vietnamese nationalism and more.