I Can’t Wait For You to Grow
(2024)
🌏 Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne
In ‘I Can’t Wait For You To Grow’, Phuong Nguyen Le and Adrian Jing Song exchange dialogues of family secrets. Growing up in Southeast Asian households and now apart, both artists reflect on the hidden, the withheld and the unsaid. For Le, the discovery of his family’s archival photo album triggers the looming fear of parental expectations within his queer becoming. Through an unexpected family reunion and trips back to his grandfather’s birth village, Le gives light to the often neglected narratives of his maternal figures, thus realising how one is the product of where they come from. The archival family album is also centred in Adrian Jing Song’s work, as its reappropriation presents an indecipherable mystery, a peek into one’s family dynamic without ever fully grasping. Through presenting their projects as books accompanied by installation, the artists invite participants to interact with a state of ‘not knowing’. Photographs become context, yet withhold any closure amidst the speculation.