GUEST POST Hot Coffee conversation between New York-based curator and writer Phil Zheng Cai and emerging artists Anh Nguyen, Felisa Nguyen, and Huyen Tran

Published Monday, May 19, 2025

The conversation was recorded and transcribed from Phil Zheng Cai’s coffee chat with Anh Nguyen, Felisa Nguyen, and Huyen Tran at Think Coffee in New York City. Just like coffees are meant to have hot, the four came together right after the opening of their exhibition “Open Kitchen 002 - Fusion” to discuss the processes, objectives, and other critical discourses generated alongside this show. Given the project is about communal support, instead of a traditional Hot Coffee conversation, Nina invited Phil to be the one asking questions.

Phil Zheng Cai: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?

Anh Nguyen: I'm imagining I'm in a coffee shop in Dalat in Vietnam. It's on the side of a mountain. The floors are wooden. I'm drinking an iced black coffee. I see a cat crawling up to me.

Felisa Nguyen: I'm a fan of canned drinks, believe it or not – I like to get this matcha latte from a Japanese grocery store on 14th and 6th ave. I walk from there past Washington Square Park, to Mercer Playground. I don’t see as many people here, maybe some passing through, walking their dogs. I sit by myself on these benches that surround these really beautiful big trees, and flowers that bloom in the springtime.

Huyen Tran: I would be in Le Phin, a small Vietnamese coffee shop in the East Village. Probably order a pandan latte or Vietnamese iced coffee. I'm seeing a lot of people because the place is very crowded, usually looking at the window seats or outside. I see neighboring stores such as the barbershops and stationery shops. I’m also looking at the baristas and talking to the owners probably. It's a very intimate and cozy space.

Installation view, Open Kitchen 002: Fusion. Image courtesy of Phil Zheng Cai.

PZC: Now the scenes are set, let's jump right in with our questions. Do you think this final presentation achieved what we were aiming for? For the three artists' works to physically and conceptually support each other and to provide a critique on a general “Asianness” that is perceived in the West with a lack of heterogeneity within the community.

FN: During the opening, I was having conversations with people that revealed a lot for me, particularly affirming this success of the work in critiquing the idea of a homogeneous Asian community. I largely received two lines of questioning:

One was from people who didn't know that it was a collaborative work. They would discover that I was a part of something within the whole show, which included three curatorial projects, and then they'd ask: “which one?” I pointed generally to the part of the floor designated for “Fusion”, at all three of the works, then explained that I also worked with Anh and Huyen. Then the viewers would follow up and ask: “Which parts are you?” People who knew the work was collaborative still immediately asked: “What did you contribute?” Answering this was really counterintuitive to how I felt about the work myself, that every part of each of the works is all of ours, that the works and materials we were bringing in did not exist anymore as isolated parts.

I think there were all sorts of nuances, conflicting things that I wanted the work to achieve – wanting to defy this homogeneity and acknowledge the difference between us three as artists and what we contributed, while simultaneously wanting to make these distinctions inaccessible. It was fun to play with and vary my responses to these questions, and I enjoyed a lot that the work triggered those conversations, and that in answering those questions, there had to be a sort of resistance to that.

AN: When you first approached us with the idea of this show, it was such a hard concept for me to wrap my head around. And one of the points that you have brought up too is that it's something that you haven't really seen done before. I realized in the process of doing it, what it really took was distancing from your ego in it.

So much of art is authorship - you have claims over what you do and what you own which is always clear. People take pride in that authorship. But in order for this to work, we have to really understand that it's not my work; it's not your work; and we just have to make something new.

And reflecting on the audience asking “what part of it was yours?” I think it's really rather a critique on the Western ideologies of viewing art with a clear sense of authorship. I think our project challenged those ideas of ego and authorship.

HT: I think we did achieve our goal, but I also would like to have more time for each of us to contemplate on the properties of the Western lens and perspective on Asian art. Personally, I don't have that much experience yet exhibiting in public spaces to understand how institutional curators or directors work. I haven't deeply examined how those perspectives influenced Asian exhibitions in that sense.

Because each of our works come from different concepts, I believe we did a good job architecturally, but maybe too good of a job. We could have examined the impossibility of blending everyone together more structurally. How seamlessly our works interacted is like a counter to the purpose of the project which is to highlight heterogeneity. There's a line that we're dancing with. I could use more time reflecting on how to navigate this line. But in general, it’s an interesting experiment for sure.

PZC: I'm really glad that you brought up this topic because I kept something undisclosed from the beginning. When I first conceived of the project, I was hoping to just construct one structure with everyone's work added in, which doesn’t resemble anyone’s work in particular but distributes a mixed “Asianess.” You deviated from that by proposing three structures.

Interestingly, I believe you jointly created a fourth artist who is Asian, and that person created the three structures. To your point of letting go of the ego, I was initially planning on a complete blend, but I wanted to honor your creative liberty so I approved the three-structure setting immediately. I’ve been looking into the concept of how some curators become individual agents of creation when working with artists, and I didn’t want to push for that limit just yet. It's fascinating to hear your perspectives without me disclosing my intention.

AN: With regards to something we wish we had done, we never in-depth talked about what our works mean to us and how we view the Western gaze in order to deconstruct that. We removed ourselves a bit too soon without a full understanding.

There were parts in the process where, for example, the moment when Felisa explained to me about the milk tea cans which carry meanings of anti-colonialism, it immediately clicked for me because it’s the same for my Condensed Milk work. That was a serendipitous moment highlighting the reason for collaboration, and I wish we found more of those definitive moments.

FN: I felt the same way as Anh – there were parallels in our respective works, creating moments that clicked when we were making together.

However, if I think it could have been equally interesting to highlight our differences instead of the sameness. I loved Anh’s Condensed Milk photo as soon as I saw it, and it was an immediate response to place it with the royal milk tea cans. But what if we combined things that may be less apparent and more confusing? Matching approximate things was joyous and exciting, but we might create meanings that are more substantial if we had more time to play out our differences.

HT: The difference would indeed highlight the points that we're trying to make: heterogeneity within Asian art. We were more zoomed in on the structural relationship between the items when we created. And a part of me relied on Phil, because I trust him and his concepts. So subconsciously, I dove into an execution mode from the beginning. I wished I had counter argued more during the entire work process.

PZC: We received fantastic critical feedback from two artists. They said they were expecting more of a fight between the works. This is a very good comment to me because sometimes a fight and a joint effort go hand in hand. The tougher the fight is, sometimes the better things are integrated. What are some responses that you have to that?

FN: We all had a lot more ideas that we held back on for the sake of finishing the project on time, but also because we were very passionate about the curatorial proposal and wanted to bring this collective vision to life. I thought about this as a reflection of the Asian diasporic community. Tensions and fights are subterranean, unacknowledged or swept under the rug so that progress can be made, so that a main objective can be reached. It's a drive to present a polished thing despite the ugliness in the process. This is embedded into the making of the artwork itself, and also in the setting of a community art initiative. Perhaps the fight is not explicit structurally, but that absence indicates its own tension.

HT: I also wonder what would happen if Phil just presented the idea to us and then let us work autonomously without any intervention or guidance at all. There might have been more tension that way. As we already set the tone of collaborating for a commonly agreed goal, we default to not fighting in order to achieve that goal. When Phil acted as a coordinator of the project which he did, we were more grounded and less expressive in our intention to create tension inside the group.

PZC: It's also the sheer fact that it's the first time that the four of us worked together. Even though we agreed to share everything that's positive or negative candidly from the very beginning, which I vividly remember, we were being polite to one another. Maybe it’s our Asianess, but we wanted it to go well seamlessly. I would assume the next time we do similar things, it will be different.

I have an individual question for all of you, starting with Anh. As a photographer, how might this collaboration inform your future practice?

AN: In photography, there's an urge to flatten everything when you try to perfectly capture a story or feeling in one photograph. Especially when you present it in a viewing space, you want that photograph to capture what you're trying to communicate. In doing that, you flatten it.

Even though a lot of my work deals with objects, performances, and visceral subject matters, I’m very accustomed to using photography to create one perfect thing which is physically 2-D. This process taught me so much about how photos can be more than just two dimensional. Felisa and Huyen think so differently compared to me. For example, they would walk around the room to experiment different viewing experiences from different angles when resolving their installations. This truly inspired me because traditionally I wouldn’t be experiencing a gaze in a photograph from, for example, its sides.

So I think it has influenced my practice a lot in terms of thinking about the photograph as an object and as something that can have more than just a 2-D life.

PZC: Huyen, as an installation artist who works with many modulated elements, did this project lead you to any new understanding or thoughts towards using modules in sculptures and installations?

HT: Before this exhibition, I had only worked with multiples in the way that I would make tons of copies of them and use them in a military way - each individual comes together to become one entity. Their meaning is only created by this joint entity as a whole, with each individual creating very little unique meaning. Take the cardboards for example: they come in the forms of flattened stools. This act turned a 3-D object into 2-D which was later re-expanded into 3-D, recreating the shape of the stool. Each cardboard cut-out alone cannot exist as stools themselves, they look more like an “A” shape or just an icon or symbol of the stool.

This installation helped me think about other possibilities such as using them as a foundation, a pillar, or something else so that the entity doesn’t have to exist on its own. It can be an entity for another entity, or to provide a platform for bigger ideas or concepts to rest on. By doing that, I am metaphorically evolving my military industrial complex to other societal systems.

PZC: This reminds me of the song “Another Brick in the Wall.” The reason why people love it so much is because of its emancipatory nature. We anticipate each brick in that wall to eventually become pillars and part of a support system which fights off another repressing force.

Lastly, Felisa, as an artist who incorporates ready-mades in your practice, how does this project inform your outlook in approaching objects?

FN: My existing approach of working with objects is not me imposing an amount of control or ownership of the item, but rather reconciling that relationship. I collect these objects before knowing what they can become, or what they are already, so my process involves spending a lot of time alone with them. This project has both complicated and reified that – everyone brought different things to the conversation which added an extra layer of matter. It became a reconciliation between me and the work, the work and Anh and Huyen respectively, between Anh, Huyen and me, too. The emergence of all these new relationships excited me.

AN: What's an example of how our movements and interactions of your items differentiated your original intentions?

FN: The orchid clip that I’ve enlarged was created with a specific function in mind – it was always going to hold two stem-like bodies together. One of the most exciting moments during the process, which didn't even make it into the final structures, was Huyen clipping it onto her stack of cardboard stools. Ironically, it disappeared along the way, and I think that is a part of the beauty of this project. These relationships that we have with objects don't have to be solidified and frozen.

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