Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS

May 14, 2022 – June 19, 2022
The Renaissance Society

at the University of Chicago
5811 South Ellis Avenue
Cobb Hall, 4th floor
Chicago, IL

Diane Severin Nyugen. Still from “IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS,” 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.

Diane Severin Nyugen. Still from “IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS,” 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.

IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS marks Diane Severin Nguyen’s first one-person museum exhibition. The show, co-organized with SculptureCenter, New York, presents a newly-commissioned 19-minute video of the same title and four photographs in a total installation resembling a theater and its backstage.

Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances. Spilling over from first-person narrative into near-abstraction and pop music video, Nguyen traverses the complicated beauty and multivalent forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image making.