September 30-October 30, 2004

Introduction

Pipo Nguyen-duy (Pipo), a Vietnam-born artist, humorously probes issues of race, identity, cultural dislocation and assimilation in AnOther Western (1998-2004). Pipo’s modern photographs (toned, gelatin silver prints) appropriate the distinct form and iconography of the popular nineteenth-century tintype portrait.

AnOther Western addresses the complexity of the artist’s experience in the U.S. as an immigrant. Countering the negativity of stereotyped images of Asians in the nineteenth century—subjects were typically depicted as opium addicts and prostitutes—Pipo constructs portraits of himself in the well-to-do western dress and style of the mid-to-late nineteenth century American portrait.

Affordable to many—with the exception of newer immigrants and the lower working classes—nineteenth century portraiture mirrored the aristocratic style of European painted portraiture, reinforcing the egalitarian promise of the industrial revolution and a nascent American republic. The most reasonably priced of early portrait photography, the tintype (a photograph on japanned iron), was invented, in fact, at Kenyon College in 1856 by Professor Hamilton L. Smith, and Peter Neff, Jr., a former student of Smith’s.

Negotiating cultural spaces, Pipo’s photographs are part performance, part masquerade. From image-to-image, the artist—as poseur—appears in different garb as a dandy, a photographer, a gunslinger, a saloon cowboy, a Civil War soldier, a pugilist, a miner, and as an itinerant musician. Consonant with the nineteenth century practice of clearly displaying artifacts related to one’s identity, vocation or profession, Pipo’s period portraits brim with rifles, pistols, holsters, knives, musical instruments, a camera, a physician’s bag, a shovel and a pickaxe. Pipo undermines the supposed objectivity of the photograph. With a keen sense of the comic and the absurd, he demonstrates in these portraits not only the easy metamorphosis of the photographic record, but also its more obvious artifice—such as the modeling of crude, dime store beards and moustaches.

In amusing fashion, Pipo, who grew up playing cowboys and Indians in Vietnam, inserts himself into the familiar genre of the American cowboy. For all the democratic possibility of the nineteenth century photograph, the very incongruity of Pipo’s work reminds us that the enduring , all-American image of the cowboy is essentially impervious to evidences of race or immigrant status. While Pipo’s visually arresting images are convincing on one level, taken as a whole, the implausibility of his elaborate, extended pose suggests that full assimilation is not possible.

Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery

Pipo Nguyen-duy, AnOther Western series,
toned gelatin silver print, 1998

Pipo Nguyen-duy, AnOther Western series,
toned gelatin silver print, 1998