Michelle Antoinette
“Inheritance: a Vietnamese-Australian ancestral legacy carried in 5 tables, 2 coins, and numerous other precious objects and actions”

At 12 years old the minty smell of eucalyptus simultaneously reminded me of the gum trees in the schoolyard and of being sick; mum scraping my skin with a 20-cent piece coated in a thin film of Eagle Oil. Bà ngoại [my maternal grandmother] saw me gazing at them in their little plastic container transfixed. She came over with a cloth, picked them up and wiped them clean: ‘Here, take them’ [she said].

— Phuong Ngo, for Inheritance

What is it that we inherit from our families, our ancestors? What kind of inheritances are carried from one generation and one place to another in the case of migrant communities? How do we understand inheritance in the case of displaced refugee communities, torn from their homelands and who often flee with a minimum of material possessions to be able to pass on?

Describing one of the formative experiences prompting his latest three-part exhibition project Inheritance, held across Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide from 2025, Vietnamese-Australian artist Phuong Ngo reflects somewhat ironically on his inheritance of two, French Indochinese one piastre coins that circulated in colonial Vietnam and which have been in his possession for the last 26 years. They were first given to him by his maternal grandmother in 1996 when Ngo was twelve years of age and first visited his ancestral home of Vietnam with his parents and siblings. It was also the first time his parents and his older brother had visited Vietnam since fleeing the country by boat and making their way to live a new life in Australia, where Ngo was eventually born and grew up. Ngo recounts how during this visit, with his inquisitive ways as a child, he fortuitously came to acquire the coins: ‘I sneakily rummaged through the top drawer of my maternal ancestral shrine. There I found a small plastic container with a screw top lid, not too dissimilar to a Vicks VapoRub container. Rattling around inside, submerged in white flower oil, were two, one piastre coins. The smell of the oil and the sight of the coins; I knew instantly what this was and what it was used for before I even came to realise the colonial history of the coins years later.’ In this powerfully transformative moment, Ngo first recognises his diasporic cultural connection and belonging to Vietnam, connecting the continuing use of such coins in his familial Vietnamese childhood upbringing in Australia, with his ancestral origins in Vietnam.

After decades of holding onto these coins, with only one prior appearance in his practice, Ngo has given them greater presence and significance in his Inheritance exhibition project – as a means to reflect on and reconfigure what is meant by inheritance in the case of communities such as Ngo’s family, forcibly displaced from their homelands and suddenly denied the generational wealth that would have otherwise been passed on. This familiar refugee story is, not unsurprisingly, often recounted on the whole as a story of grief, suffering and loss for displaced communities whose lives have been traumatically ruptured from their homelands. In his Inheritance project, however, Ngo invites us to reframe this diasporic narrative from the lens of his experience as a second-generation migrant. His exhibition focuses our attention instead on what kinds of precious inheritances have nevertheless been gifted to him and future generations – whether material, cultural or affective in kind – taking the form of objects and performative practices that both carry and renew ancestral histories across generations and geographies.

Alongside the coins themselves, in Inheritance Ngo provides us with deeply personal insights into some of the more intimate familial inheritances he has been gifted. In a two-channel video work on display, we see Ngo and his mother on the concreted back porch of his parents’ suburban Australian home. After much careful positioning of themselves to achieve the right height and distance relative to each another, and relative to the eye of a camera which Ngo’s mother wears on her chest, Ngo peels his t-shirt up off his back inviting his mother to perform the ancient healing ritual of cạo gió on him. With this practice, originating in China (Mandarin: guā shā /刮痧) and spreading to other parts of East Asia including Vietnam, we see Ngo’s mother first applying the requisite drops of medicated liquid-emerald oil onto Ngo’s bare skin (the renowned Dầu Gió Xanh Eagle Brand ‘green oil’, which comes in a distinctive hand-sized art-deco glass bottle, is manufactured in Singapore and commonly found in households in Vietnam and across Southeast Asia; interestingly, it includes eucalyptus oil as a key ingredient, thus linking it to centuries of traditional Indigenous practices of healing in Australia that also value the native eucalyptus tree’s healing properties). Beginning at the top of Ngo’s back, Ngo’s mother starts to vigorously and methodically scrape her son’s oiled skin with the edge of one of the family coins. The repetitive strokes are seen to produce increasingly reddening, rash-like markings or ‘petechiae’ and thereby ‘scratch the wind out’ of Ngo to release his body of ailments. Throughout the practice, the two converse in Vietnamese language with each other – an obvious linguistic inheritance. In this maternal gesture of care and healing, cạo gió enables intergenerational connection between Ngo and his mother, and in turn, with Ngo’s maternal grandmother whom the coins once belonged to and from whom cạo gió was most likely learnt, directly or indirectly, by Ngo’s mother. That the coins have been put to this familial ritual of healing also speaks to a reconfiguration of the former colonial currency of these coins, to their renewed and personal cultural meaning today for Ngo and his family in the diaspora. Finally, Ngo’s mother’s creative collaboration is also significant in this video work as Ngo invites her to take the lead in guiding the camera work required to record and ultimately archive this act of care and cultural family heritage for the future.

Another video in the exhibition project refers to another set of precious objects inherited by Ngo, this time from the paternal side of his family – a pair of jade earrings that once belonged to his paternal grandmother and which the artist has been wearing since January 2025. Ngo features in the video again, his face and ears up close to the camera, accompanied by the sounds of his mother’s and sister’s voices (his mother in Vietnamese, and sister alternating between Vietnamese and English as does Ngo himself). His sister has evidently been tasked to direct the camera’s focus this time, by keeping the side profile of Ngo’s face and ears tightly within the frame, and after Ngo struggles to take off his existing earring himself (his ears fairly newly pierced, just a few months before), his mother assists, her hands seen carefully removing his stud earrings and exchanging them for her mother-in-law’s jade earrings with their distinctive four-point yellow-gold casing and elaborate screw fastening. In this way, Ngo ties the familial legacies from both his mother and father’s maternal lineages, now literally carrying this history on his person with the help of his mother, and with his sister’s help has co-created an audio-visual record of this intergenerational exchange for the family album.

The family coins reappear in yet another video work, this time as part of a seemingly playful divination practice to forecast the future, but as is often the case with Ngo’s mischievous brand of humour this also conveys a much more serious point. In the video work, we first see an upturned white ceramic bowl resting on a jade-coloured saucer on top of a worn, star-patterned melamine surface – actually this is the surface of Ngo’s family dining table in Australia, itself also installed in the exhibition with the bowl and saucer atop of it. Next in the video, a pair of hands quickly comes into view to pick up the bowl and its accompanying saucer. They hold the bowl and saucer firmly together and shake them three times with the sounds of clinking and rattling being heard in the process, before they are returned back onto the table surface and the bowl lifted to reveal two coins resting inside on the saucer. Depending on whether the flipped coins have landed on the side of ‘heads or tails’ is thought to foretell the future fate of the person whose divination is being sought from their ancestors. In this case there are ironies of colonial and postcolonial futures being forecast as well, as the French Indochine federation era coins flip between the former French colonial figurehead ‘Marianne’ – the personification of the French Republic – on the side of the coins’ ‘heads’ and the imaging of the region’s local rice stalk plantations on the side of the coins’ tails. In the context of the Vietnamese ancestries being invoked in the exhibition, we are also subtly reminded of the future of Ngo’s family and a whole generation of Vietnamese people, whose lives were impacted by colonialism and suddenly overturned with the fateful Fall of Saigon fifty years ago on 30 April 1975 – an anniversary that coincides with the first phase of the Inheritance project in 2025.

In another iteration of the divination practice, the same actions occur on the surface of a marble table top. Actually oval in shape, this table ‘top’ is also present in Inheritance but repurposed instead as a supportive base for its aged and worn wooden table frame. Meanwhile, a set of newly-created marble table-top counterparts are stacked on their side on an A-frame trolley near the entrance of the exhibition at West Space – one square, one round, one rectangular. They speak to the central objects of the exhibition – a set of three wooden table base structures of differing shapes serving as supports for the video presentations. The square and rectangular table bases are newly constructed for Inheritance. They are recreations of treasured tables that once belonged to Ngo’s maternal family in Vietnam but which were sold by them in order to get by after the family wealth was redistributed by the state following the Fall of Saigon. Ngo tells us how his ‘mother recalls jade carvings and antique furniture being taken from their homes’, including the marble-top tables. With the help of carpenters in Vietnam, Ngo reconstructed the tables that we see presented in Inheritance in the likeness of the original ones once owned by his family, and in doing so creatively ‘returns’ these to his family’s inheritance. The worn, oval-shaped table is the only original item from Ngo’s ancestral homes in Vietnam still known to exist and was first acquired by Ngo’s father’s family prior to his parents meeting. With its link between both his mother’s and father’s families, Ngo considers it a fitting ready-made family ‘portrait’. Ngo negotiated with his family in Vietnam to acquire and transport the table back to Australia in 2015, before the family home was demolished in Vietnam in 2016, along with other items from his ancestral home such as a cupboard, grind stones, mortars, and shrine objects, some of which are also included in Inheritance.

The deconstructed way the newly-made tables are presented in the Inheritance exhibition – with their tops split from their bases – can easily speak to the disassembling and reassembling of life that Ngo’s family experienced in fleeing Vietnam and relocating themselves in Australia. Importantly, the table bases also carry a hidden ancestral significance in their materiality as the timber used to make them was salvaged from Ngo’s ancestral colonial style home in Vietnam before it was demolished – the same ancestral home which was built in 1925 and which Ngo had visited on his first trip to Vietnam as a twelve-year old child acquiring his grandmother’s coins, and where the only remaining original family table came from. Lining the side of the exhibition space for Inheritance at West Space are multiple lengths of the original 100-year old timber pieces which formed the frame of the family’s ancestral home, stacked in piles on the gallery floor – their woody aroma gently infusing the air in the exhibition space. Though Ngo’s family home in Vietnam was demolished to make way for a new building, one family continues to reside in the area and cares for the family’s ancestral connection to this place. Ngo explains, ‘they keep the incense burning for our grandparents and great grandparents; they tend to the graves of family that rest behind the house, and they ensure that there is a place to visit on our pilgrimages back to the mother land.’

Yet another way in which the ancestral home imbues the space of the Inheritance exhibition is through the sheer pink-tinged curtain that hangs across the windowed wall of the exhibition space – with the netted curtain’s pink colouring achieved by the natural pigment Ngo extracted from the original wooden beams of the ancestral home and used to dye the curtain. With its fleshy tones and light-filled transparency, the curtain takes on a spectral quality as if presencing Ngo’s ancestors. It is from behind this sheer curtain, now filled with ancestral histories, that Ngo delivered a silent durational kneeling performance facing the wall. In doing so, he references experiences of corporal punishment that are perhaps surprisingly recalled rather nostalgically among his second-generation Vietnamese Australian friends – as Ngo recounts, whether ‘kneeling while facing the wall or on rice, standing on tables arms stretched, and the classic caning, [these] were all forms of corporal punishment that many of us endured, and though shocking to those outside of our communities, I relate to these “punishments” with a sense of connection to my ancestors.’ Indeed, in closing his performance, Ngo stands up, and as if inviting the presence of his ancestors, gently infuses the curtain with additional layers of the pink pigment mist – his spray gun becoming a quasi-ceremonial object. The performative recollection of punishments in Inheritance, therefore, is not to invoke shame but quite the opposite – it relates these domestic practices of childhood punishments within and across generations as a distinctive cultural legacy (‘how our parents were punished and how their parents were punished’). It also highlights how this common experience of second-generation Vietnamese Australians helps to create a sense of community among the Vietnamese diaspora. Furthermore, Ngo’s re-performance and documentation of this practice, alongside the different acts of familial care shown throughout the exhibition, collectively contribute to his creation of an ‘embodied archive’ of his family’s histories.

Contrasting with the set of elegantly carved wooden table bases reconstructed for Inheritance is the far more modest second-hand melamine table with steel legs, dating from the 1950s. It is meaningful to the exhibition not least because it was the first dining table the Ngo family acquired in Australia. Unlike other items in Inheritance with their origins in Vietnam, the melamine table embodies the memories forged by the Ngos in Australia. Upon leaving Vietnam in 1981, the Ngos like other refugee communities were dependent on charity and government assistance to make their start in Australia. Their ‘new’ dining table had a previous life and had already suffered some minimal damage by the time it came into the Ngo family’s possession, but the Ngos made it their own and have cherished it over the decades. Ngo recalls, ‘This table was the centre of the household – we ate, we cried, we laughed, and we argued across it, and although it is only now used to give offerings during cultural celebrations, it is still an integral part of family life.’ Re-situated in the Inheritance exhibition space, its presence reminds us of the new memories that second-generation migrants and their parents create together upon re-establishing themselves in a new place and how the simplest of possessions can help to instil a sense of normalcy and pride in daily home life and habits, to make life liveable again.

Inheritance also registers that it often falls upon the second generation of political refugees, such as Ngo, to recall their family’s pasts, connecting their diasporic presents and futures in Australia with their important ancestral histories elsewhere. They help to pry open and remember histories which have often been too traumatic for their parents and grandparents to continue to recall or suppressed by them in the necessity to get on with life for their and their children’s sake.

Ngo’s Inheritance project is a potent reminder that his ancestor’s histories continue, via the meanings and memories that live on in their family heirlooms and everyday rituals, even after the disruptive effects of colonialism and displacement. Through the array of precious objects, re-performances and documentation that Ngo collects, re-presents, archives anew, and gifts and re-gifts through the exhibition, the artist re-enlivens the intergenerational story of his family’s legacy across Vietnam and Australia for generations to come. He emphasises the unique inheritances that they continue to carry with them, now and into the future, and the hope of forging new inheritances. While deeply personal, Inheritance is finally also a reminder of the diverse cultural histories that make up Australia, gifting important cultural knowledge for all of us to carry with us and share at our tables.

All quotes from the artist are taken from his unpublished concept text for Inheritance, 2024.

Phuong Ngo: Inheritance premieres at West Space 12 April → 7 June 2025.

Curated by Amelia Winata, this three-part project is supported by Creative Australia through their VACS Major Projects Commission.