Reminiscence
A Southeast Asian Female Artists Exhibition
An official concurrent exhibition for the 2021 conference for
the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA)
organized by Soe Yu Nwe.
Artists
Amy Lee Sanford
(Cambodia / USA)
Le Hoang Bich Phuong
(Vietnam / USA)
Linda Nguyen Lopez
(Vietnam / USA)
Nia Gautama
(Indonesia)
Soe Yu Nwe
(Myanmar)
Suwanee Natewong
(Thailand)
Cambodia / USA
Amy Lee Sanford is a Cambodian-American sculptor. Her work explores the intersection of trauma and healing.
Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and raised in the United States, the artist holds a degree from Brown University in the Visual Arts, with concentrated study in biology and engineering. She furthered her art studies with individual courses at The Rhode Island School of Design, University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth and Harvard University.
Sanford has been in numerous exhibitions internationally. A partial list includes Archives in Residence (Haus der Kunst, Munich), Break, Bind and Rebuild (A+ Gallery, Kuala Lumpur), UnAuthorised Medium (FramerFramed, Amsterdam), Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image (Singapore Art Museum), Love in the Time of War (SF Cameraworks and UC Santa Barbara), Cascade (solo exhibition, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW, Australia), Images Biennial: An Age of Our Own Making (Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark).
Le Hoang Bich Phuong
Vietnam / USA
Bich-Phuong Le grew up in Vietnam and is currently a Portland-based and Saigon-based visual artist. Her artwork is driven by the individuality and the ambiguity about social structures, reality and mindscaping. Le started using traditional Vietnamese silk as her primary medium after she graduated from Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts, Vietnam in 2010. Her recent works have expanded to include ceramics and fiber-based materials. Throughout her career, Le has been given many opportunities to create exhibitions on Vietnamese traditional art techniques. Le has shown her works in Denmark, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. In 2018, Le became the first Vietnamese artist selected for the Institut France residency program, a residency sponsored by French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Recently, her works have been referenced in “La symblique dans l’art Vietnamien contemporain” by Francois Damon and “Contemporary Feminist Art in Vietnam” by Cristiana Nualart.
Colleen Toledan
Philippines / USA
Colleen Toledano is an artist who works with ceramics and other media. A native of Buffalo, NY, she received a BS in environmental science with a minor in studio art at Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn. (2001), and an MFA in ceramics at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (2005). She is currently an associate professor of design in ceramics at SUNY Buffalo State.
Toledano describes her work as “influenced by the recognition of our society's yearning for building revitalization and body improvements." She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Examples of her work can be seen in the collections of the Alternate Space for Contemporary Arts (White Plains, NY), ArtPark (Lewiston, NY) and the Red Lodge Clay Center (Red Lodge, MT).
Khin Thethtar Latt
Myanmar
Born and raised in Myanmar, Khin Thethtar Latt aka Nora is a multimedia artist who started her art career in 2009 as a performance artist. Currently based in Yangon, she has had numerous group exhibitions not only locally but also internationally such as in the UK, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Malaysia. As a performance artist she has participated in Nippon Performance Art Festival in Japan, Super Market Performance Festival in Sweden and other performance art exchanges in Malaysia. In 2015, she was the Young Talented program Solo exhibition winner in the ION Art program in Singapore. In 2019, she had the opportunity to join an art residency program in Sweden.
Linda Nguyen Lopez
Vietnam/USA
Linda Nguyen Lopez (b. 1981, Visalia, California) is first-generation American ceramic artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us. Lopez received a BFA from California State University of Chico and an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, New Zealand, England and throughout the United States including the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; The Hole, New York; Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn; Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery, New York and Museum of Art and Design, New York. She has been an artist in residence at The Clay Studio, Archie Bray Foundation, CRETA Rome, and Greenwich House Pottery.
Nia Gautama
Indonesia
Nia Gautama (b. Jakarta, 1973) is an independent artist resides in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. She earned her Master of Fine Art Degree, graduated Cum Laude from Faculty of Art and Design, Institut Teknologi Bandung in 2016.
Since early 2000, she has actively exhibited both at home and abroad and participated in numerous art biennales including The 5th Indonesia Contemporary Ceramics Biennale, Jatiwangi, Indonesia (2019), The 2nd Shanghai Modern Pot Art Biennale, Shanghai, China (2010), The First Jakarta Contemporary Ceramics Biennale (JCCB#1) (2009) and The Ceramic Road of Southeast Asia, Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan (2009).
Her work is in permenant collection of FLICAM Ceramic Museum, China and Lawangwangi Creative Space, Bandung. She was also a finalist for Gudang Garam Indonesia Art Award 2015.
Soe Yu Nwe
Myanmar
Soe Yu Nwe is a prolific artist from Myanmar. After earning her MFA from RISD, Soe has participated in numerous international residencies. Soe exhibits her work internationally in galleries and museums. Soe’s work has been acquired by the acclaimed Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Australia. Soe was named in 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30: Art & Style List.
Soe Yu Nwe’s artistic practice explores notions self in relation to nature and culture. Reflecting on her own multicultural identity as being fluid, fragile and fragmented, she creates hybridized bodies by referencing the viscera and the botanical in nature’s various states of growth, decay and death. Soe Yu’s experience of living cross-culturally has inspired her to reflect upon identity through making- conceiving it as a fluid, fragile and fragmented entity. Through transfiguration of her emotional landscape by poetically depicting nature and body in parts, she ponders the complexities of individual identity in the globalized society.
Thailand
Suwanee Natewong was born in Northeastern Thailand. In 1975 she moved to Dankwean Village, a traditional pot-making village and began her career as a ceramic innovator and business woman. She cofounded Umdang Ceramics, a design and fabrication firm that produces large-scale murals and exports ceramics and other handicrafts worldwide.
Suwanee's murals are installed in the studio building at the Archie Bray Foundation, and the Farmer Museum. She and her sister, Sudarat Koetmongkhol, collaboratively installed a mural in the Queen of Thailand's Lodge in the Phu Kweaw National forest, as well as in many hotels and government buildings. Suwanee has demonstrated her techniques in Nepal, Malaysia, Australia, Europe, Mexico, China and the United States. Suwanee had received grants and fundings from the US National Endowment for the Arts, the Archie Bray Foundation, LHProjects, and the Asian Cultural Council. She held a solo exhibition at the 1991 NCECA Conference in Tempe, Arizona. Suwanee was awarded a Fulbright Scholar in Residence Grant and was the Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi in 1999.
