Dinner, Look
February 1-March 1, 2025
Opening Banquet: Saturday, February 1, 6-9pm, in collaboration with Hùng Lê and Vi Ngô
For their inaugural exhibition, 100,000,000 is pleased to present Dinner, Look, a solo show by Detroit-based artist Kiwi Phong Nguyen. Nguyen’s practice celebrates intergenerational love, self-determination, and desire by simultaneously deconstructing and recreating modes of adornment. He colorfully partners family objects with the body, recontextualizing ephemera as wearable garments. Cultural translations create new images. Soda cans, plastic beads, and a blurred snapshot of a friend, all become jewels. Steel clothing racks jut from the walls, staging manipulations of material and pattern in bold sculptural collages. In essence, Nguyen develops a nascent language, a code for playfulness, pain, longing, love, protection, failure, and triumph.
To celebrate the opening of 100,000,000, as well as the exhibition and Lunar New Year, we will host a Chinese hot pot party in collaboration with Nguyen and Kansas City based artists Hùng Lê and Vi Ngô preparing Vietnamese fare. Guests are invited to the elaborately decorated banquet coinciding with Lunar New Year. They are encouraged to bring their own bowl and eating utensils. This event will be interactive, a collaboration with those who attend, a performance of art-making.
“What is a party but a spectacle with its eye—its beating heart—trained fixedly on the possibility of love in real time?” -Nguyen
