Ngô Hứa Minh Trí is a Vietnamese-born American artist, whose work traverses the vast expanse between individual and collective narratives. His creations, nodes as he called them, echo with the nuances of desires, longings, hopes, and dreams. They touch on the infinite, capturing ephemeral moments to invite a reflective journey into the collective threads that bind us. At the core of his artistic exploration lies the commitment to subvert the boundaries of the self, to be unseen and ever-evasive.
and to the unfoldable distances within our shared constellation
to my mother,
it is a labyrinth that sieves the footprints of thoughts
a book
a body
shattered
wings
Trí Ngô
All rights reserved. c. – Tri Ngo
This site is being written. Between the shifting walls, contorted floor, and mislaid ceiling, its words may not reflect full actuality. Proceed with caution.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Preface
We fucking hate art. We hate art with the capital A and we, unquestionably, hate art with the lowercase a. Yet, despite brimming contempt, here we fucking are, bedding and whoring, legs spreading between spreading legs, finding ourselves ensnared in its mangled sideways orifice, its bent back, and its cocked cross. We resent it all.
But-still, against the lonely nights steeped in melancholic dejection, the false promise that is its embrace has often been our salvation. It offered us solace and saved us from ourselves.
This relationship, however, this path on which you have become a companion, is formed by chance, upon a shattered body, upon a blanket of snow, upon grief. Its point of origin lay in the chill embrace of our mother, when her sweat froze into iron-laden snowflakes, as we fractured, crumbled, and fell into this inescapable crypt. Art became our means to escape, our means to process, a way to let loose our unfreeable tears.
Our works toil to bridge the gap between the finite and the in-finite, to measure the immeasurable, to reclaim everything that slipped through our flawed grasp, to trace the lines between the stars that form a constellation, to give form to the transient light between our gazes, to fold the space between here and home. Our creations are holistic nodes. Unlike our atomistic body, where the whole breaks into parts, into parts, into parts, a holistic being divides into themselves, into themselves, into themselves – each a rain droplet, each an ocean.
Every work is an infinity within an infinity. Some serve as snapshots of space and time, some as explorations of material studies, some as records of thoughts and of dreams, while some are simply farts of our imagination, shit-stains born of midnight intoxicated tirades. Each piece is a contemplation on this moment, where we are right now, this point of zero, wedged between the negative googol to the googolplex of our past and the googol times a googolplexian squared of our future. In this grand perspective, all the time we have spent together, our temporal sum, is woefully minute. Yet! And yet, along this same thread, the spatial partition between us, our interspace, no matter how far apart, across an ocean or to the moon and back, is inconceivably near. We are eternally entangled in our touchless embrace.
So here we are, standing in our self-designed catacomb, a labyrinth of ever-constant shifting walls. Here! We, doomed Icarus, yearn for salvation. Each exit we passed is another entrance. Each word has spiraled us ever deeper into ourselves. Our wings, contrivances of our own intellect, offer no deliverance. We are bound by our deficiencies. Our bull awaits us. What will you do now, my dear companion? What course will you take when this guide is void of senses?
Reach out and touch your nose, for that is the width of the Pacific.
Blink, for that is the measure of our shared history.