Week 5 Art, Self-Portrait, ASA 115, Janine Nguyen

In all my years of creating art, I find that one of the most difficult tasks to do is to make an accurate self-portrait. As we create art, it is easy to beautify oneself accordingly to anglicized standards of beauty; many art mediums that are classic and iconic are based upon Caucasian features, so I found it very difficult to accurately portray myself while conveying my message. In this traditional piece, the mediums I used were colored pencils and markers. The soft shading from the colored pencils were complemented by the jarring elements of the markers.

In this art, I left my skin white and unshaded. Throughout my childhood, I have been raised with the notion that lighter skin equated with higher status whereas darker skin implied that an individual was a laborer in the fields. Raised in a Vietnamese-American household, my knowledge of Vietnam, my native country of origin, was limited to what I scarcely learned in my high school education and the refugee stories that my family members rarely told. The "Áo dài" dress I am wearing is adorned by images of a laborer in a rice paddy field and the decimation of the environment from the war. The images are purposefully childish; these images represent the perceptions I had of the Vietnam War - it is a two-dimensional, flat depiction in which innocent people had lost their livelihoods due to the cruelties and traumas associated with war.

From the naive misconceptions I had of the shift in Vietnam's history, to the South Vietnamese flag in the background, my background as a Vietnamese-American has led me to believe that I am a "race traitor", for being ignorant of my history and lack of connection to my supposed homeland. While I am Vietnamese, my fluency is not nearly as proficient as my English and German level of fluency. While I identify as Vietnamese-American, I am stereotypically seen as a "Chinese doll", which I have frequently heard due to my stature and skin color. I believe that my attributes that separate me from the masses helps me gain a broader perspective of what it truly means to be an individual in two worlds.