Ann Phong: Re-Evaluating Normal

March 12 – May 21, 2022 | CSUF Begovich Gallery

RECEPTION | Saturday, March 12, 2022
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (Exclusive Preview for Art Alliance Members)
12:00 – 4:00 PM (Public reception)

For over four decades, artist Ann Phong's paintings offered a glimpse of global challenges that reshaped her as an individual and we, as a society. Phong’s new body of work focuses on the crises amplified during the past two years of the pandemic. Rendered in vibrant hues, intense impasto textures, and embedded found objects, Phong's large-scale paintings ruminate on memories of migration; the ongoing Covid 19 pandemic; contemporary social, political, and racial tensions; and the negative impact of humans on the environment. Through expressive abstraction, Phong transforms her paintings into an invitation to pause, think, and recalibrate how we co-exist. Re-Evaluating Normal prompts us to re-imagine building a better normal. Artist's website: annphongart.com

Ann Phong received her MFA at CSU Fullerton ('95). She has exhibited nationally and internationally at select venues such as the Watts Towers Art Center (Los Angeles, California), the Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, California), Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (Kitakyushu, Japan), Center Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), Gandong Art Center (Seoul, Korea), and Andaman Museum (Bangkok, Thailand). She served as Board President of the VAALA (Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association) between 2009 and 2018. She is faculty in the Department of Art at Cal Poly Pomona, where she teaches Drawing
and Painting.

"Ann Phong: Re-Evaluating Normal” is organized by CSUF Nicholas + Lee Begovich Gallery and it is curated by Jennifer Frias Director/ Curator, with curatorial assistants Kaina Bernal, MA Candidate in Public History ('22) and Anna Ponomareva, BA Candidate in Art History (‘22). Support for the exhibition and the gallery is made possible through the Art Alliance, Associated Students, Inc. Instructional Related Activities, the College of the Arts, Department of Visual Arts, and our community partners at the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA).

Learn More

“Lost and Found in Transition: Ann Phong and Memories of Ruptures,” an essay by Quan T. Tran, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer & Senior Program Coordinator, Ethnic, Race, and Migration, Yale University

"The Women of the Vietnamese American Arts Scene in Orange County" (KCET ARTBOUND)

"Ann Phong Portrays Her Past Through Art"  (2019) - Daily Titan

Image: Ann Phong, "From Sunrises to Sunsets," 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 30"  x  60," Courtesy of the artist