Race Graft

This essay analyzes a 2024 exhibition by contemporary artist Hương Ngô called Ungrafting, which presents a series of photographs and other multimedia experiments that index a history of French agronomists and botanists in French Indochina, present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Ngô complicates inherited definitions of grafting that depict it as a solely scientific and botanical method of conjoining two plants and instead identifies its poetic resonance across other topics of study such as photography, anatomy, geography, history, race, and empire. The essay situates Ngô’s exploration of French Indochina within Asian/America and argues that her exhibition reveals the work of “race graft,” defined as the technocratic and aesthetic consolidation of racial matter and forms within and beyond the human. Tracing how the project of race graft translates into other mediums such as images, skin, rust, and soil, this essay ultimately illustrates how Ngô’s aesthetic draws on art, poetics, and installation to engage a feminist science and technological critique that crafts as it grafts, creating a language to draw dynamic geographies of relation, and contribute to a growing number of gestures invested in a decolonizing aesthetic for how we envision Asian/America in our world.