Conversation and Reception
February 27, 3 p.m., at the gallery Los Angeles photography curator Sam Lee speaks on “War and Vietnamese Photography.” The talk is followed by a community discussion with curators Christopher Rauschenberg and Stephanie Snyder.

Surface
Liza Nyugen visited Vietnam for the first time in 2000. During a second trip in 2004, the artist traveled to villages and forests decimated by Agent Orange and other wartime toxins. Nyugen collected handfuls of earth from nineteen sites, carried the soil back to her studio in Europe, and photographed each sample on a clinical white background. Entitled Surface, Nyugen's series is an archive of absence and remembrance. In the artist's words, the photographs represent "... bodies turned into dust." Re-imagining the ravaged soil of her father's native country, Surface is a somber and beautiful portrait of loss amidst new possibilities.  

Liza Nguyen was born in France in 1979. Nguyen studied fine art and photography in France, and in Germany at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf with Thomas Ruff. She completed a Masters Degree in Photography at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, Paris (2003), and a Masters Degree in Art at the Sorbonne (2004). Liza Nyugen Lives and works in Paris and Düsseldorf.