Current Portfolio
Harvey Milk, Interactive art installation using 40,000 fingerprints and
thousands of interviews from Lgbtq civil rights activists to form a
historic painting of Harvey milk. using artificial intelligence, augmented
reality, and virtual reality, the interviews are drawn out of the
fingerprint in the painting.
National AIDS Memorial Grove, the only national monument dedicated to
HIV/AIDS asked me to bring the stories of those etched in stone alive.
Using Google AI Vision to recognize each name of the memorial, visitors
can interact with the memorial to further transform their experience in
the grove. I use augmented reality to grow a tree with leaves depicted the
Life of the departed, the size of the installation is a large room.
AIDS Quilt, the largest folk art in the world at 54 tons and 50000 panels
was looking for a way to have it accessible to people and have some of the
Quilt be curated by the people who made them. I made an augmented
installation app using physics and realistic light estimation to bring the
quilt home to people and they can record about the person who they made
the quilt for and all symbols associated with it.
AIDS Abstraction, using my background in computational mathematics, I
wanted to see how different quilts would project itself on the faces of
those who are memorialized. Studying structure, transformation, motion and
projection these are the resulting paintings from that study.
A Calling
I was born in the middle of the American/Vietnamese War in communist
territory. My childhood was running and hiding in barracks shuffling
from shelter to shelter until the end of the war which left my family
destitute. We decided to flee Vietnam by boat.
In the refugee camps of Hong Kong, we were fed painterly images of
America where we were seeking refugee status. Upon landing in the
projects of Kansas City, Missouri, I understood immediately that the
lens that was used to paint the imagery of America was through a
different social class. The station in which I was in required me to
fight for everything I have to gain that image that was implanted in my
mind.
I fought through the crime and poverty and received my doctorate in
computational mathematics and a cozy job being a full professor of
applied mathematics. But something was nagging me, and mathematics did
not answer those questions. My journey as a human being, as a gay boat
refugee from Vietnam required me to be an artist to fully articulate my
profound gratitude for those who have laid the foundations for my
rights.
This website is chronicles the artistic journey I have taken to meet
those who have fought for me, celebrating the color of my skin, for my
sexual preference and health. This is my healing process, my calling.
x-Khoi Nguyen
