Two Names: The Ideological Construction of Multiculturalism and its Mechanisms

Yuvinka Medina: Can you describe your installation Untitled (Entitled) at Bonniers Konsthall and explain what it represents?

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: Untitled (Entitled) is a text-based installation composed of moveable chromed structures onto which lenticular prints are mounted. I conducted interviews with cultural workers who live with “two names,” one in their mother tongue and a western homologue, and the outcome of the conversations is expressed through the installation of lenticulars. Each interviewed subject is presented by a lenticular panel mounted on the moveable structures that will be activated by dancers. In addition to the structures, custom-made handles are interspersed on the walls inside and outside the gallery space.

YM: Through your work you explore the ideological construction of multiculturalism and its mechanisms. Can you explain how the work Untitled (Entitled) is an extension of that exploration?

JHN: In earlier works such as Space Fiction & the Archives (2012) and The Making of an Archive (2014–ongoing), I was invested in the emergence of multiculturalism as state policy and thereby its visual limitations. Untitled (Entitled) stems from these investigations and is a continuation of my exploration of the ideological construction of multiculturalism within liberal white colonial settler society and its internal workings. My aim is to make visible the uneven cultural and linguistic translations that overshadow migrant experiences and bodies. This recent work focuses more specifically on the inherent contradictions in modes of communication and the shortcomings of language.

YM: This is indeed present in the work. Not only does it expose that though our names we can be subjects for domination and restriction, it also suggests that as a consequence, suppressed bodies struggle to facilitate communication—for instance through undergoing a change of name. Have you investigated any particular theory of communication? What was notable about it?

JHN: At the turn of the previous century, the father of modern understandings of communication, Ferdinand de Saussure, established the “speech circuit” theory. It consists of the theory of cyclical and symmetrical oral and interpersonal communication. It was famously represented by a diagram where two facing heads are connected together with a dotted line moving from one head to another. The arrows show an uninterrupted movement that is equally shared between the sender and the receiver, where a communication stream intriguingly resembles Newton’s pendulum, in which the conservation of momentum is smoothly, almost magically, preserved between two extremities. I grew up in the French-speaking part of Canada, and obtaining a flow of communication was not a fluid process—as represented in Saussure’s figure. One of the limitations with Saussure’s model was that my face was not a reflection of my interlocutor, contrary to figures A and B in the diagram. The faces are identical, a mirror image of each other, while my face became a moment of arrest or of study, and my uttered sounds were often not heard anymore.

YM:You grew up in Montreal, correct? Being first-generation Vietnamese-Canadian, what is your perception of linguistic diversity, often cited as the core of multiculturalism in Canada?

JHN: I grew up in one of Canada’s most diverse neighborhoods, Côte-des-Neiges, which was mostly populated by newly landed immigrants and known for having neither French nor English as the dominant language. Once I started elementary school in my neighbourhood, I quickly mastered the spoken lingo of lower- and working-class Québécois, and left my mother tongue at home. Despite being fluent in Québec’s French, I was still met with apprehension or surprise from the descendents of the French colonial settlers, Québécois. My undeniable facial features, revealing my heritage from the landing of boat people, could not be taken away from me––as opposed to my parent tongue. It became clear that multiculturalism fulfilled the function of a form of social engineering that maintained settler colonialism’s status quo, but to my eyes it was a shattered and failed promise of diversity.

YM: It is important for you to expose the daily realities and struggles of non-white lives, such as those who have been forced to implement westernized naming practices. Your name is on one of the lenticular panels. Would you like to share your personal experience? 

JHN: To facilitate my integration into Canadian society, and coinciding with the beginning of my education, my parents gave me a French-sounding name: Jacqueline. Three generations in my family had already been to French school and were accustomed to French culture due to the colonization of Vietnam, but I never thought that having Jacqueline, instead of Hoàng, as my given name was something remarkable. It, however, performed as a linguistic proxy and facilitated my teachers’ daily roll call performance. A few years later, a classmate from Haiti told me that she had an adopted Western-sounding name, a phonetic equivalence to her name. Her comment, said light-heartedly while playing in the courtyard, stayed with me. Her revelation made me feel exposed, since Hoàng was by then a name relegated exclusively to my home, a fate similar to my mother tongue, but, more importantly, I realized that other people had similar experiences despite their origin.

YM:  When researching for Untitled (Entitled) you reflected on processes that bring about linguistic challenges that impose inequality on migrants. Could you sum up your study?

JHN: The history of name change in the Canadian context is not a recent phenomenon. From the early colonization of Turtle Island, the practice of renaming has been a widely used form of cultural erasure. Passed in 1876, the Canadian Indian Act was primarily concerned with assimilating First Nations people, and one aspect of the assimilation process was the renaming of entire First Nation populations. The aim was partly to extinguish traditional ties and, more importantly—because Canadians from European heritage found many of the names confusing and difficult to pronounce—it also meant it went against the state’s assimilation objectives. Between 1831 and 1996, during the residential school system, Indigenous people were forced to change their names to Euro-Canadian as a persistent process of removing a person’s cultural identity. Even worse, between the 1940s and 1970s, e-numbers were assigned to Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. Stamped onto discs, the identification numbers had to be worn around the neck of its proprietor for census data or medical record purposes, but more notably, because white administrators were unable to pronounce Inuit names. ​

Chinese labourers coming to Canada in the nineteenth century were often nicknamed “John Chinaman,” forcibly omitting their individuality. The term was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, coined by British sailors who, unwilling to learn how to pronounce the names of the Chinese ship workers, came up with the generic moniker of “John.” The nickname followed the Chinese miners and railroad workers deep into Canadian mines and inner lands as interchangeable labour power. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Black Canadians had limited employment opportunities with any upward mobility. Men in Black communities across the country were relegated to train porters and called George, or, more condescendingly, “George’s boys.” The assigned name referred to George Pullman, a nineteenth-century American industrialist who pioneered and popularized a brand of train service modelled after the type of Black servitude found during the plantation era. Being a porter was a thankless job: hauling luggage, having sleepless nights zig-zagging across the country while rocking white passengers into the arms of Morpheus. 

Clarity in communication can be seen as a form of tyranny for non-white people, yet it also conceals power from the dominant group. Naming and renaming practices in the colonial context is a way of asserting power through a claim of possession, or of erasure, as articulated by filmmaker and literary theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha: 

Since clarity is always ideological and reality always adaptive, such a demand for clear communication often proves to be nothing else but an intolerance for any language other than the one approved by the dominant ideology. At times obscured and other times blatant, this inability and unwillingness to deal with the unfamiliar, or with a language different from one’s own, is, in fact a trait that intimately belongs to the man of coercive power. It is a reputable form of colonial discrimination, one in which difference can only be admitted once it is appropriated, that is, when it operated within the master’s sphere of having.¹

Forcible name change does not happen en masse anymore, yet the process could be understood as highly internalized and individualized today and more common than one would think. As Trinh T. Minh-ha concisely said, the necessity of re-naming so as to un-name.​² These reflections became the foundation for realizing Untitled (Entitled).

YM: With that in mind—your experiences at school could be explained as an uneven cultural and linguistic translation caused by internal mechanisms of multiculturalism—as Trinh T. Minh-ha describes it?

JHN: As a kid, the beginning of the school year was always a moment of apprehension. The roll call attendance would become a site of anxiety both for teachers and myself. Even though my name is spelled with Latin letters, the teacher would stumble and sweat while wrestling with their own language as it became unruly in their mouths. The first day in class was one of the rare moments where a school teacher would lose their authoritative poise. All these new faces from all corners of the world bundled in one room meant scavenging through a jungle of names with unknown phonetics. Yet, for the remainder of the year, the pupils were forced to tame their tongues into dominant Québécois French rather than expanding our teachers’ oral proficiency in cosmopolitan parlance. 

YM:  Tell us, was there anything in particular that you wanted to explore with the aesthetics of the installation Untitled (Entitled) and, in particular, the lenticular panels mounted on the  structures? Why did you decide to use lenticular print? 

JHN: Lenticular lenses, used predominantly for advertising billboards, allow for the presentation of two images on one plane, which is known as the so-called “flip effect” in lenticular optics. Depending on the viewing angle, the picture shows one image merging into another, so the passerby’s position creates an illusion of animation, giving the onlooker agency to choose their own position and what to see in the work. For the layout design of the lenticulars, I collaborated with New York-based graphic designer Chris Lee. Lee’s studio-based research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards, and the question of what makes something legitimate. During our conversations, I expressed my desire to move away from a black and white text, the more commonly known aesthetics of institutional or conceptual documents. Rather, I was drawn to the highly saturated colours that can be found in the aisles of Asian grocery stores. This is partly fueled by a feeling that non-white bodies still largely occupy spaces of labour and consumption, but not of political or economical influence if not abiding to the model minority. Therefore, the formal aspects of the installation are an exploration on the aesthetics of what “support structures” could look like.

YM: But this work has been in the making for quite some time already, right?

JHN: My investigations for a text-based lenticular installation based on name change already began in 2012, directly after completing Space Fiction & the Archives. I took part in Ken Lum’s Master Class: Art and the effects of the Real at the Banff Centre and, during this period, I conducted my first interviews and experimented with printing lenticulars. I subsequently pursued most of the conversations online, either by emails or over Skype, partly while I was in residency at ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik) in Berlin in 2014. I continued with large-scale printing during a residency at Daïmôn Centre de Production Vidéo Photo Nouveaux Médias in Gatineau in 2016, but the technical difficulties for achieving a proper “flip effect” forced me to work with a commercial printer. I also continued my collaboration with my designer Chris Lee on a notation system, alongside choreographer and dancer Nina Djekić at Haverford College in Philadelphia in 2019. Now that I’m reviewing the needed time for the production of Untitled (Entitled), I find it quite astonishing that it almost took a decade to complete the work and that I had not given up earlier!

YM: We are thrilled to enable the production of the new performance you choreograph. Your working process with the dancers has been based on collaboration and transmission of knowledge—how did you work with the movement composition?

JHN: I’m delighted to be able to complete the work with the performance element for Bonniers Konsthall. The performance is composed of three dancers who activate the installation, in which I wanted to explore the movement of Newton’s pendulum where bodies are synchronized through repetitions and patterns, without being mechanical. I was lucky to be an artist-in-residence at SITE, a production house and an artistic platform for professional contemporary performing arts, with a focus on dance, in Stockholm during the summer of 2020. I had the opportunity to cast dancers and selected Ama Kyei, Andrea Svensson, and Mona Namer. Later in the process, Gülbeden Kulbay joined the group. Together with the dancers, I wanted to collectively explore themes of support structures, care, emotional labour, and synchronization. 

YM: You have collaborated with composer Thunder Tillman for the music, which is explicitly composed for the performance. Tell me about the process and the starting material you used.

JHN: The score was carefully crafted with composer and longtime collaborator Thunder Tillman. To reveal the disciplining nature of learning a foreign language, we sampled pre-recorded audio material of self-study language classes and also included newly recorded material. The musical arrangement is organized in a series of sonic tableaux, where words, grammar, and linguistic idiosyncrasies take centre stage. For example, in one tableau I examine the notion of “false friends.” In linguistics, false friends are words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning, such as “kiss” in English and “kiss” in Swedish. The latter actually means “pee,” but has an analogous phonetic to its English counterpart. In another tableau I explore the concept of tongue-twisters. A tongue-twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate or helps to improve one’s fluency. In this case, I relied on the sentence: “Je suis ce que je suis, et si je suis ce que je suis, qu’est-ce que je suis?” which translates to: “I am what I am, and if I am what I am, what am I?” While being a playful challenge for the French-speaking tongue, it also unwittingly encapsulates the quintessential struggle between language and identity. In this case, words are meant to be a neutral and a formal carrier without meaning, yet they encapsulate a subtle political or cultural undertone.

YM: Thank you! I’m so excited that we can present Untitled (Entitled) completed with the performance. Should we return to the rehearsal?

JHN: Yes!

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn comes from Canada and is currently a PhD candidate in Art, Technology, and Design at Konstfack and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Her education includes the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, and Concordia University in Montreal. Nguyễn’s work has been shown internationally at institutions including the Július Koller Society, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019) CAMPLE LINE, Scotland, UK (2019), the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018) and Trinity Square Video, Toronto, CA where Untitled (Entitled) was shown (2019). Nguyễn’s work often takes the form of installations that combine audio, video, printmaking, and photography. She employs a research-based process where she often uses archive material to reveal the unnoticed political relevance in overlooked histories.

Each print issue of 38.1 features a limited-edition artist multiple by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn titled Untitled (Entitled) (2019-2021). The inclusion of Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s postcard project is generously sponsored by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

1. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 84.
2. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, 14.

This article is published in issue 38.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue