PSU art graduate unveils project about Vietnamese Portlanders

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A Portland State University art graduate’s project is now finished and on display in an exhibit, nearly a year after KOIN first interviewed her about it.

Lillyanne Pham worked on “Thương” for about a year . In Vietnamese, “thương” translates to “love,” and in her project, she interprets the word as the way elder Vietnamese people might say “I love you” to younger family members.

Pham, who is also Vietnamese, hopes her work will encouarge others to learn about Vietnamese people whose stories are not only about the Vietnam war. The Indiana native said she is grateful to be able to do this project and said “This is my dream project, to be able to say thank you to Portland and the restaurants and the businesses. I’m just grateful for the resources here: the people and the places. Without it, I feel like I wouldn’t have as much connection and without the internet, I wouldn’t have connection to my culture either. Like how to get to Portland from Indiana. Just really grateful for it.”

For this project, she showcased eight Vietnamese Portlanders and 14 local sites that are special to them, which she then made into 14 augmented reality sites that visitors can access with their smartphones.

Her multi-media exhibit includes photos, audio clips, even a newspaper she created. Pham tells KOIN that people often “focus on the augmented reality, shiny portion.” But she also “wanted to bring to light the tactileness of our ancestral technologies.” In doing so, her exhibit also includes a type of paper that can last about 800 years. “It’s a traditional Vietnamese paper that I got from Hanoi,” Pham said. “And then I printed the sites on it.”

In 2023, Pham won the $10,000 Andries Dienum Award from the university for this project.

The free exhibit will stay up through December 14th at the Broadway Gallery, inside Lincoln Hall at Market and Broadway.

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