Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, five feminist and queer artists from the Vietnamese diaspora transform St. Paul’s Xia Gallery and Cafe into a space blurring the lines between an exhibition and a site of mourning, memory and imagined return. Through video, photography, sculpture and mixed-media installations, “Re/Homing: Walk-ins Welcome” confronts the instability of  “home” for refugees. 

Curated by Christina Hughes, an assistant professor at Macalester College, the show opens amid heightened border enforcement and deportations to reckon with what has been neglected, and to consider the many ways diasporic communities build lives and create belonging in the U.S.

The title, “Walk-ins Welcome,” references a common phrase seen in nail salon signage tied to Vietnamese American labor and entrepreneurship. But here, the artists ask: who is welcomed, and under what conditions?

After the Fall of Saigon

“My family arrived as part of the first wave of Vietnamese refugees right after the fall of Saigon (the former capital of South Vietnam, now Ho Chi Minh City),” Hughes said. “They were South Vietnamese, fleeing what they believed was a communist takeover. They were privileged refugees, tied to U.S. military service, and were often treated as ‘model minorities.’ But even with this supposed privilege, they faced a downward mobility that became a profound contradiction.” 

Her father, once a chemist, ended up driving trucks and working in a nail salon. Her mother, caught up in a financial web, was incarcerated in a federal prison. These experiences inform Hughes’ academic work on “refugee racial capitalism,” a term that builds on Black radical thought to describe how refugees are funneled into low-wage labor,  fueling the economy while being denied adequate state support.

When the government “stops spending money on things like childcare, schools, healthcare, welfare benefits, poverty relief, and instead, it decides to invest in prisons and policing as the answer to various issues, where do refugees fit in that story?” Hughes said.

“Refugees are really offered two paths when they get here: one is to assimilate into a model minority subjectivity and the other is to labor under welfare conditions that make them work while also keeping them in a cycle of poverty,” she added. “Those are the people that oftentimes get incarcerated, over-policed and are now made deportable under this administration.” 

Hughes’ installation features a prison visitation booth constructed from cinder blocks and covered in crochet granny squares, a skill her mother taught her while incarcerated. The work reflects what Hughes describes as “alternative infrastructures of community care.”

What grows at the border

From Hughes’ yarn-covered prison booth, the exhibit leads into the “Bureaucratic Checkpoint,” a mixed-media installation by N. Bui. They thin rau muống (water spinach), a staple in Vietnamese dishes, into sheets of handmade paper to explore how living things are flattened into objects of state control. 

The cultivation of water spinach became more common in the U.S. after the arrival of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970s, which led to increased government regulation. In several states, the plant is considered an invasive species, making it illegal to import and transport between states without a permit.

Bui’s installation draws directly from this tension. The “Bureaucratic Checkpoint” is constructed from materials that document attempts to regulate the plant, but the plant itself bursts beyond its confines.

“It’s a contemplation on the regulation that this plant is experiencing,” Hughes said. “It’s being placed analogously to the regulation of human movements across borders.”

Inside the nail salon

Documentary filmmaker Quyen Nguyễn-Lê will present a reimagined mobile nail salon to honor their mother’s business, which closed suddenly during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Nguyễn-Lê remembered flipping through Seventeen magazines while her mother’s nail salon became a sanctuary for service workers — bus drivers, construction crews, nurses — bodies worn down by long shifts and in need of care.

“I learned a lot about my family history through sitting in that nail salon and listening to my mom and her co-workers speak,” Nguyễn-Lê said. “It’s not like they sat there, did nails and talked about the war, but over time, you catch fragments and the story kind of comes together.”

The installation reflects on the cultural role of salons in the Vietnamese refugee community and Nguyễn-Lê’s own childhood memories of growing up queer within that space — observing, but not always feeling like they belonged.

“I think when you’re in the diaspora, there’s this kind of heaviness around passing on the culture, like ‘Do your kids know Vietnamese?’” Nguyễn-Lê said. “When you’re queer, you’re totally out of the conception of what people expect, which is both liberating and sad. Liberating in the sense that you’re free because no one can define you … sad because, in many ways, your family forgets about you.”

Mothers, daughters and grief without language

Artist Ly T. Nguyen, born in Vietnam and now teaching Asian American Studies at Augsburg University, presents a sculptural and video installation that weaves together her matrilineal lineage.

One piece features hands, evoking an intimate memory of massaging her grandmother’s paralyzed fingers that were worn down by decades of labor. A video documents Nguyen shaving her own head, using the hair to build a family tree that resists patriarchal norms in Vietnam, where women are often written out of ancestral histories.

The installation becomes an emotional excavation of Nguyen’s experience growing up in post-war Hanoi, surrounded yet estranged from three generations of foremothers.

“All of us were almost like strangers living in the same space,” Nguyen said. “No one asked questions. No one wanted to share the stories because these stories, when being shared in a country where everybody has an understanding of what it means to live under war, are almost like ‘So what? You have pain, you have suffering. Everybody does.’”

Nguyen hopes visitors leave her installation thinking not only about personal loss, but about how to live in solidarity with displaced people. “Just because they are not legally recognized doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be here,” she said.

The labor of remembering

Artist Nhung Walsh’s audio installation works with a year-long collection of interview recordings from a survivor of the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre, where more than 400 Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers. 

The survivor, once a child in the village, later became a state-recruited voice, traveling from community to community in Vietnam, reciting his testimony as part of a national campaign to mobilize resistance against U.S. military presence. Over time, Walsh observed, the repeated telling of this traumatic story began to hollow it out—turning lived memory into something external, rehearsed, and distant.

Rather than present the survivor’s words, Walsh focuses on the gaps of silence between phrases and sentences in the archive of recorded testimonies. Her final piece is an audio file composed almost entirely of those silences.

At its core, “Re/Homing: Walk-ins Welcome” is less about answering what home is and more about asking how diasporic communities live in its absence. Across its five installations, the exhibit explores the quiet, often painful distances between refugee parents and their daughters. 

“There is nothing normal about forced migration and displacement,” Nguyen said. “Even if you survive and get to stay in your homeland, there are a lot of things that have been lost and sometimes, you don’t know what is lost. You don’t have the time and space to contemplate it. Surviving is always the number one priority.”

Hughes’ prison booth installation makes literal the wall between an incarcerated mother and her child. In Nguyễn-Lê’s mobile nail salon, care is exchanged daily, but the queer child remains on the periphery. Nguyen’s family tree, constructed from her shaved hair, mourns the absence of maternal stories lost to war and repression. Walsh’s audio recording centers what’s left unsaid in a survivor’s retold trauma. Together, “Re/Homing” reflects the ongoing effort to reclaim what was lost or never fully passed down in the spaces refugees created to survive.

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