The Future Loop

About the artists

Huong Ngo (b. 1979, Hong Kong SAR) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies (2004), was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow (2011-2012), and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Vietnam (2016). She is currently a visiting lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara. Her work traces the entanglement of colonial history, migration, language, and labor while imagining new futures from their fragments. She works across mediums, traversing borders and making connections through differences. At once intimate and political, Ngo's practice listens for what remains.

Ngoc Nau (b.1989, Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam) graduated from Vietnam Fine Art University, majoring in Vietnam art history and criticism. Ngoc Nau is currently working with various mediums including video installation using 3D software, and other open sources on the internet to create new dimensions for video. She also works with photographic light boxes, Hologram projection and Augmented Reality (AR). In Ngoc Nau's work these techniques have been used to refer to how new media shape our view of the world. This thought in her work is related by the current context of Vietnam's development and chaos of contemporary culture. She explores the controversy surrounding what traditional values are, highlighting the multiple types of abuse of power to gain wealth and looks into the psychology of humans to adapt to scientific development. Her art practice is concerned with the social and cultural phenomenon of modern humanity.

This conversation was conducted online between August 4th and 29th, 2025.

Huong Ngo (HN): I was wondering if we could begin by thinking through how the future is conceptualized, particularly in relation to migration, as I think that both of our work grapples with this relationship in so many different ways. We might also start to untangle how futurity is bound up with technology, labor, spirituality, language, and politics. I was wondering if you could start with a description of one of your related works?

Ngoc Nau (NN): In my family, we believe dreams tell us something which could be happening in the future and we must pay attention to them. A curiosity about the images that I see in my dreams motivates me to create art because when I wake up, the feelings remain very strong, sometimes staying on my mind for a whole day or even months.

I wonder how the act of questioning the images in my dreams influence the way that I observe the waking world. In particular, this applies to the case of the transformation of my hometown.

I grew up in the town called Thai Nguyen, where my grandparents chose to settle after they evacuated from the U.S. bombing to Hanoi in 1964. Over the past ten years, it has changed so much since the land was sold or rented to foreign tech factories. I saw many unusual things and unfamiliar faces around my grandparent's house over this time.

Meanwhile, I heard many advertisements about these developments with fancy words such as 'smart community', 'majestic islands', 'projects to bridge the future', etc... They have been replacing lands in service of the new economic program which is focused on high-tech production.

In 2014, Samsung Corporation started to build a factory complex next to my grandparents' land in Thai Nguyen. Considered one of the biggest factories in Southeast Asia, the project has modified not only the landscape but also the locals' living conditions.

The whole area is under the Vietnamese government's overall plan to transform the town into one of its centers for technology production. Nevertheless, in that ever-changing area remains the locals' reserved sites for ritual practices for the Mother Goddess, which honors their spiritual beliefs. This tradition is both a form of reminiscing the past as well as expressing the hope to be protected by gods.

In my work "Ritual object 1" (2022), I draw elements from the ceremonies in relation to the events that have happened since the beginning of Samsung's intervention. The work combines ritual objects, video footage of rituals, as well as open source content that I encountered throughout my research about the land since 2015. Through the use of light from reflective ritual material, I contemplate on the co-existence of technological development and religious preservation.

Overall, most of the raw material used for this video comes from public spaces, either physical such as the 'Hau Dong', or 'spirit possession,' ceremony, or virtual from social media and digital platforms.

And you, what motivates you to think about the future?

HN: My family was also from the North, from Ha Noi and Hai Phong, but they left in 1979 during the border dispute with China (because my father is ethnically Chinese), and I was born en route in Hong Kong, where we stayed in refugee camps. I grew up in the United States at the tail end of the cold war era, and our cultural landscape was filled with science fiction films and books that really captured the imagination of that generation and encapsulated political preoccupations of that time. Think "Star Wars", "The Jetsons", "2001: A Space Odyssey", etc. I really do remember watching "Star Trek" and marveling at the multicultural utopia that it promised. There was something fascinating about how technological advancements, even just particular materials associated with space travel, became indelibly associated with the future. Technology became a stand in for all of the hope, ideals, and solutions promised in those narratives, and in turn, real technology was developed in the very image of those fantasies!

Throughout my childhood, my parents worked in electronics factories – making components, circuit boards, and computers that were attempting to reproduce this future that was promised. Recently moving out to California, I've met so many other people whose parents (or themselves) also worked in these factories. There was a huge percentage of immigrants, particularly immigrants from Southeast Asia, who did this kind of work. I've been puzzling over why that is the case. Part of it is obviously the timing: these industries were cropping up just as Southeast Asian immigrants arrived. But also, I often wonder whether employees were motivated or compelled by a promise to be part of an imagined future. I'm curious if they saw themselves in it and whether it helped them move on or run from a past that was difficult to return to.

In my current work, I've been collecting vintage components from those factories and making sculptures with them that can somehow speak of the labor and contributions of so many immigrants in the history of technology. I'm curious about how these tiny objects can tell the big story of all of the hands that were a part of producing them – can somehow communicate the hopes, dreams, and sheer determination of that generation. The factories that you witnessed being built in Thai Nguyen are contemporary versions of where my parents worked, so I'm particularly interested to learn about the migration of these industries back to my 'que huong'/homeland, how they have affected our people, and how you process it in your artwork.

Are your grandparents still living there and are they okay? An incredibly unfortunate byproduct of electronics manufacturing in the US is the ecological devastation. Many former factories and surrounding land are still Superfund Sites (designated by the U.S. EPA as polluted and needing remediation). Have your grandparents witnessed this on their land?

NN: My grandparents and other family members are still living there. One time, I used to ask my grandmother what she thought about the new factory built next to her land. At that time, I was surprised by her answer: "We would be poor without the factory." It is true that since the factory is located in the village, my grandparents got a large amount of money by selling lands to the project investors. At the same time, my uncle has turned most of the garden and farming land into temporary rooms for renting to workers, so they could earn money every month, which they could not earn the same amount when they were farming. They even bought a big car, which was a huge asset to their neighbors and to other farmers.

The whole landscape has changed so much compared to what I saw when I was a kid. My memories of the land was of a peaceful landscape. I remember every weekend, my mom and I drove to visit them on a Honda Dream through many curvy, small, and yellow-clay roads. My grandparents' house is almost at the end of the village road. The atmosphere is very quiet, I could only see green, smell grass and rice, and hear the sounds of birds, insects and frogs at night.

Nowadays, the big road/highway is right next to a changed land. Every morning, hundreds of big buses bring workers from different places to the factories. Rooms for rent are built on most of every farmers' arable land. The water canal, once used for rice fields, now is rarely used for farming. The direction of the stream has been changed and water is mostly used to provide by the factory for production. I can smell the strange scent from the factory from faraway. It is a typical chemical smell of the cutting fluid. When I was working inside the factory, I heard other workers talk to each other: not many workers wanted to work in that production department because it was seen as the most toxic.

In the beginning, the locals could smell it from outside, but nobody had any knowledge about what the smell is and the effect of smelling it everyday. Increasingly, it has become normal and everyone has forgotten about its presence. Nevertheless, it is still strong and unpleasant, particularly when there is no wind.

HN: Yes, when we last met, you told me about working in the factories! I was recently in conversation with Lisa Park, who wrote "The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy" [1] with her collaborator David Pellow. Pellow actually went undercover as a factory worker for research as well. The stories shared by the other workers and what Park and Pellow discovered about the health and ecological effects of the factories are truly horrifying and still not very well known about the industry. They also track the struggles of factory workers in advocating for themselves and their health and the regulation of this industry.

Can you tell me a bit more about your experience? Where were the workers coming from and what was the typical demographic? How long did you work there and how did it change your perception of the factory and your project? There's a scene from "Ritual object 1" where the factory appears to be burning and the workers are outside. Can you give us some context for that event?

NN: I still remember very well the feeling and the whole process of working for the factory. I applied for the work through a third party (an agency). The process for applying for the job and starting took two days. The rules were very strict, workers could not bring anything inside and we could only go through two gates for body scanning. So, I could not film or take any pictures to document the experience. Everything stayed inside my memories.

My days working in the factory felt so long because everyday I had to work about 10.5 hours indoors with no windows, so I could not feel anything from outside, only white fluorescent lights everywhere. There were two break times: one for ten minutes and another for one hour and 15 minutes for lunch or dinner. I worked for two departments. First I was sent to a department for CNC cutting where my work was cleaning machines and gathering waste from the cutting materials.

I remember the first time I entered the department, I was shocked by the noise and smell. It made me dizzy, and I had a headache for the whole day. After two days, my body started to get used to it. Very strange and amazed by how the human body could quickly adapt to these conditions. In the long term, I feared for my health being exposed to that level of noise and the chemical smells. I left after seven days for another department to assemble electronic components. I worked there as a cleaner as well, collecting electronic component trays. I felt a bit relieved of the noise and smell, but the work required me to keep standing for the entire time, my legs getting very heavy as if I was wearing shoes made of iron. I realized it was caused by blood under pressure. Many workers experienced the same feeling, some of them fainted. Sometimes we had to hide in the toilet just to take some rest.

In each department, I worked with a group of workers all above 30 years old. Some of them are from neighboring towns and many of them live faraway. The group was a mix of different ethnic minorities. I asked some of them why they chose to work in the factory. Some wanted to pay their debts, had no more land to farm, or just preferred the toilets in this factory, which were cleaner than other factories.

I remember some moments that were lovely that broke through the boring atmosphere of the factory. We sneaked some snacks into the factory and shared some plums or candy with each other to help us feel awake during the night shift. We gathered in the restrooms to share our feelings of the working day. Working inside the factory, I felt like there was no one protecting us, only the workers shared sympathy with each other. Many times we were asked to work extra hours, totalling twelve, and we were not able to refuse.

In the end, I decided to quit the job as I felt so exhausted, and I didn't receive any salary (a month's salary required six weeks of work, which is why many workers are effectively stuck). I respect workers who can sacrifice themselves to work in those conditions just to send their money back home. I know there are thousands of workers who have been working like that. Many of them might work like that for five to seven years right after they finish high school.

The scene in my video "Ritual object 1" was a protest of the Samsung workers against the security guards. In 2014, when the factory was still under construction, some workers brought sticky rice for their lunch (which was against the rules). When security guards found out, they beat and insulted the worker. The issue happened several times to many workers. One day, one worker fought back, which incited others who shared the same anger. They started to throw rocks and burn the room of the security guard. Later, police became involved but it took a lot of time to control the anger of the workers. The incident raised concerns about rules in the factory which were not familiar to farmers who were used to being more free.

In your family, or in the families of your friends who moved to the US, how have you seen traditional Asian values change like the concept of community, family ties, spiritual beliefs in nature, and the important role of mothers or women when living in a capitalist, consumer driven society in America? And more specifically, how do these changes appear in an environment that is governed by machines and technology?

HN: Growing up in the US, I always noticed a gap between the reality of what women and mothers experienced and how that is represented in popular culture. This is slowly changing, but in the past, mothers were often represented as happily laboring for the family, enduring hardships in silence. I also noticed how Asians were presented as enthusiastic, pliant workers. Understanding these types of flattened representations help unpack how machines and technology, particularly humanoid robots, are gendered and often racialized. This tendency persists today with examples too numerous to name of the pernicious cultural trope of the Asian robot or the servile feminine robot like Siri and Alexa, for example. I think it speaks to how Asians are expected to labor tirelessly and how women are expected to perform labor freely, particularly emotional labor.

But machines have been connected to women even earlier than that. Household appliances like dishwashers and washing machines were both advertised to women, but also as a replacement for women's labor in the household. The nuclear family structure within capitalist U.S. often limits or simplifies relationships of women and mothers to the world outside of their families as transactional, notions of debt to community as inconvenient and messy.

I look to my mother often to understand the difference between her generation and mine. I see her at the intersection of many different forces telling her what a woman and mother should be and having to process those different expectations and negotiate them with her own desires. I've spoken to her about working in the factory and while it was difficult in many ways, it gave her a sense of independence and empowerment through being able to help provide for the family and finding a place where she excelled at what she did. She told me how she used to work next to a group of Hmong women who complimented her on how fast she worked. She beamed with pride when she told me the story. While I know that this demonstrates the capitalist culture of the factory, I can't help but share her joy and satisfaction.

To return to that scene that you capture of the workers burning and protesting the security guards, I'm also interested in how those histories of resistance and dissent are present in Asian history, but might have been suppressed over time or might show up in quiet ways that could be easily overlooked.

Can you talk about the female workers specifically in the factories and different expectations or motivations that they had? In your film, there is a dancing female character. I read her as somewhere between the Mother Goddess and a young worker – can you expand on how you envision this character?

NN: While I was working in the factory, I could see women workers present in many production stages (75% of workers are women), for example: one production line for electronic component assembling had eight to ten workers in charge. Most of them were women. Most of the women in my team were mothers.

The Mother goddess character in my video, I think it comes from my daily life – inspired by my family, neighbors, and friends. I often see women involved in all aspects of life from production and to taking care of family and to running ritual ceremonies for the community. Moreover, I could feel their power as well as the pressure that they experienced. Through the dancing movements in the ritual, I wondered if they could somehow release and express themselves.

I often see text used as a medium in your works. How do you imagine language empowering immigration laborers? How do you connect that to the act of rewriting the English lessons of your mother?

HN: I've used language in many of my works actually as a way to embody someone else's experience. As someone of the Vietnamese diaspora, language was one of the few ways in which I was able to reconnect with my family's history, so it has always carried tremendous weight for me.

I'm currently working on a series that takes my mother's notes from English classes taught at the electronics factories and afterwards and scales them up to large embroidered pieces. What is interesting about the notes that my mother wrote is that they were meant for her to remember English, but they've ended up being a record of that time and place in her life where I have no other record. Like the factory where you worked, my mother could not bring in a camera, so we have little evidence of her time there. These notes are a tiny snapshot into her life and subtly introduce how she takes in the culture around her. Often she is asked to write example sentences to practice. She pulls from her daily life and experiences. My mother was a self-taught poet who was never able to fulfill dreams of writing, so it's especially poignant that the record of her life be in this bizarre and very specific context, doing a completely different kind of work and writing than ever imagined. While not poetic, I see her words as poetry.

Embroidering slows down the process of reading and internalizing these words, making it sometimes feel tedious and laborious like the act of learning another language. It makes me appreciate all of her labor not only as a worker having to communicate in a new language, but also as a citizen, a mother, and a wife and the expectations that those roles carried. In other works that are based on archival research, I've used language when I'm trying to understand the subjective experience of the people that I am researching or connecting with the past. It's almost a reperformance of their experiences using my own body as a medium. You highlight the use of language to sell and enact the imagined future. It capitalizes on the idea of time and development moving along an inevitable trajectory.

NN: It is true that the power of language can give us many thoughts about the future. The language in the working environment that I participated in, I felt was inconsistent with the reality that the workers experienced. I felt that the language that those companies used was only to promote their image and to be recognized by outsiders and the ultimate goal was to achieve benefits for the owners and not for the workers. Likewise, the language is also used a lot for new residential construction projects, making the locals mistakenly think that it has a high quality because of the use of foreign languages. But in reality, those projects do not show the real quality. The language is like a lullaby promise.

HN: When considering how temporality is associated with development or with a people, I am reminded of Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages" [2], which brilliantly unpacks how under-developed, particularly non-white countries are associated with the past and how technological progress, capitalism, and liberal governance are associated with the present or future, and how different political realities are assigned temporalities that cannot coexist. I would add that spiritual practices by non-white people are perceived as also anachronistically 'stuck in the past,' even if they are practiced in the present.

In English, we have so many phrases that cement temporality with progress: 'looking back,' 'time marches on,' 'behind the times,' English is also specific and more rigid in the way that the past or future is expressed. Vietnamese is structured differently in that you can establish a time period that is understood by everyone, and then speak about the events in the present tense. It's a slight shift, but I think it's important in conceptualizing time. While we've talked about futurity, I believe that our work looks back and forward at the same time.

Growing up, my mother always had a statue of 'Quan Am' (Goddess of Mercy or Lady Buddha) on our mantle. I never understood her significance until returning home to Vietnam and understanding that this goddess also protects travelers. I think she is a great one to call upon for us as we take these journeys into the future, past, and back to the present again.

Footnotes

[1] Pellow, David N., and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. "The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers and the High-Tech Global Economy". New York University Press, 2003.

[2] Nguyen, Mimi Thi. "The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages". Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.