Michelle Sou in a silkscreen portrait on a donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
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Michelle Sou in a silkscreen portrait on a donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
Los Angeles is a city full of donut shops, many of them mother-and-pop operations run by immigrants from Cambodia and tucked away in malls in Southern California.
Right now, artist Phung Huynh is standing in Donut Star, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park. It is an unpretentious oasis of cheap coffee, lottery tickets and a dizzying selection of freshly baked donuts.
Huynh has stopped here for a sweet pick-up – and some artistic inspiration. Her solo show, with the title Donut (H) hul, recently opened at Self Help Graphics and Art. It is a tribute to the Cambodian immigrants known as “Khmericans” who survived the aftermath of war and genocide.
“The exhibition is also a celebration of the Cambodian stories told through the lens of 1st and 2nd generation Khmericans who grew up in their family’s donut shop,” the artist writes in the exhibition notes.
Rapper Andrew Hean, whose family owned a donut shop in California, is depicted in a silkscreen print on a donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
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Rapper Andrew Hean, whose family owned a donut shop in California, is depicted in a silkscreen print on a donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
Huynh, a bubbly 44-year-old with black bangs sweeping across her face, first created these portraits by drawing her motifs in a style reminiscent of pop art, and then silk-screened them along with vintage family photographs on the pink cardboard donut boxes , which has become symbolic of donut shops run by Cambodian Americans. “These donut shops represent a cultural space where refugees and immigrants reshape their lives in the process of negotiating, assimilating and becoming American,” Huynh writes.
The artist Phung Huynh with his parents on a family trip to Cambodia.
Phung Huynh
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Phung Huynh
The artist Phung Huynh with his parents on a family trip to Cambodia.
Phung Huynh
Although Huynh was trained as an illustrator, and most of her work underscores her skills in painting and drawing, the donutbox series reflects a development in her use of photographs that draws on family history and traditions ranging from deeply spiritual to traumatic.
“I have a very complicated relationship with photographs and portraits, because when we left, we could not take any pictures with us,” she explains, showing framed copies of the resettlement photos taken by her father, mother, grandparents and siblings at a Vietnamese refugee camp. . “And we use photographs to worship our ancestors.”
Artist Phung Huynh
Noe Montes / Phung Huynh
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Noe Montes / Phung Huynh
Huynh’s family did not run donut shops when she was growing up, although her brother currently owns one in Houston. Her parents worked in a clothing factory when they first arrived in Los Angeles in 1981.
“And they could not speak English,” Huynh recalls. But, she says, they became close to a woman on the factory floor, she now thinks of as a grandmother. “Mine Grandmother, Nellie Pavone, was the production manager and she stood up for my parents and helped them. My mother would call her ‘mother’. She is our Mexican grandmother and she would call us her Chinese grandchildren.
Pavone noted Huynh’s artistic talent as a child and encouraged her parents to allow her to go to art school, Huynh says. Huynh is now an associate professor of art at Los Angeles Valley College and an artist-in-residence at Los Angeles County’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She is particularly proud of the way her work has been displayed in numerous civilian locations throughout the city, from the Los Angeles Zoo to the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center.
Ratana Kim in a silkscreen portrait on a pink donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
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Ratana Kim in a silkscreen portrait on a pink donut box by artist Phung Huynh.
Self-help graphics and art
Phung Huynh’s parents eventually built their own business with the support of their communities, and the artist wants to celebrate their resilience, bravery and entrepreneurship. Yet she is uninterested in perpetuating a shiny, mythologized version of the American dream.
“There’s a lot of struggle and pain,” she says of the Khmerican immigrants who built their small businesses. “I feel that for many survivors, specifically from the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, there is a lot of guilt. There is a lot of guilt about being able to come to the United States and leave the family. There are a lot of families back home who could not come.”
Meanwhile, the children who grew up in these donut shops – because there was no money for after-school care – were mocked and harassed by their peers, Huynh says. Recently, a donut shop family she knows was threatened in their own shop by white supremacy.
“When generational trauma is not even a generation away from experiencing what our brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Afghanistan are going through right now,” she says, “that’s what I’m interested in exploring. But donuts matter. Even a fugitive pleasure – it’s good. That’s what trauma teaches you. Just as enjoyment and joy are fundamental. ”