It’s not every art opening you see the featured artist cooking to order at a hot plate, but the scene encapsulated some of the spirit of “Dinner, Look,” the inaugural show at 100,000,000, in Waldo.
Over the course of the evening artist Kiwi Phong Nguyen greeted visitors at the door, fielded questions about his art in the back gallery, and took turns at the omelet pan, turning out fluffy half-moons of Vietnamese egg crepe.
Photos by Han Mellenbruch
The newest in KC’s flourishing ecosystem of artist-run spaces, 100,000,000 is a team project of six artists: David Alpert, Noelle Choy, Adams Puryear, Merry Sun, Cooper Siegel and Yuxiao Mu. The Kansas City-born Alpert is well-known in local art circles as a maker/curator/writer/idea-sparker and community-creator. The five other partners, however, are relatively recent arrivals, brought to the area by positions and fellowships at Kansas City Art Institute, KU or the Belger.
Which may explain Cooper Siegel’s first question: “Are you local?”
It’s an effective way to invite conversation. On Saturday it worked around the firepit, to visitors venturing down the alley from 75th Street. And it worked inside the gallery, in the conversation between local artist Hùng Lê’s home-cooked Lunar New Year feast and Detroit-based Kiwi Phong Nguyen’s home-inflected artworks.
When Hùng Lê was invited to participate, his instinct in turn was to bring in his friend Vi Tuong Ngo, also a recent KCAI graduate: “Vi and I have been cooking Vietnamese dishes together for the past year as a hobby, and this felt like the perfect time to expand this further.” Additionally, in an iteration of his ongoing work in indigo textiles, Hùng made an indigo runner for the hotpot table, with the express intention for it to catch “the spills and stains of the event, becoming a kind of record.”
The celebratory atmosphere of the opening, with its steaming hotpot and handmade foil garlands, provided an apt setting for Nguyen’s artwork, described by show curator Noelle Choy as an “outburst of color, charm, and personality.”
Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist with multiple interests and modes, including metalsmithing, jewelry, photography and garment design. The centerpieces of this show are three delightfully outlandish garments that burst upon the eye. Most intriguing is a stunning coat with the insouciant glamor of a Peggy Guggenheim hostess gown and the rich texture, palette, and signature zig-zag patterning of vintage Missoni. Only upon close inspection might it gradually become apparent that the coat owes its majestic volume and gorgeously geometric high relief to its origin as a molded foam mattress topper.
This recontextualizing of the quotidian and castaway is a common motif in Nguyen’s work. Nguyen sorts, arranges, displays and presents food containers, wrapped candies, soda cans, candid snapshots and other everyday objects like objects in a museum or on an altar.
A large, colorful drawing of Nguyen’s grandmother’s eucalyptus oil bottle, many times larger than life, is hung opposite the actual petite object, which is framed within a decorative plastic snack tray-turned-curio cabinet. It is a literal example of the way Nguyen amplifies humble objects that hold memory. “The work is a love letter,” Nguyen says. “It’s about serving, setting the table, inviting people to commune with each other, with peers, with family, with the ancestors.”
Reviewed Saturday, February 1, 2025.
“Dinner, Look” is on view through March 1, 2025.
100,000,000 is located in the alley between 222 and 332 W. 75th Street, across from the Waldo Mart parking lot.
