Before I Was Coral, I Was a Refugee
- Alvin Luong
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design
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Student Creative Production Grant
Corals cover the seafloor near Bidong Island in a photo from Alvin Luong's personal examination of the island's legacy and family histories. Courtesy of the artist.
Before I was Coral, I was a Refugee is a multimedia project that foreshadows a future of climate migration through a personal investigation into the legacies of Bidong Island. Bidong was a former Vietnam War-era refugee camp in Malaysia where many refugees were granted new lives in the United States.
Before I was Coral, I was a Refugee critically memorializes oral histories from the artist’s family—documenting their experiences as camp survivors—and presents them alongside narratives of present-day caretakers of Bidong Island, as well as marine biologists fighting to preserve the coral reefs that surround it.
The project coincides with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, which also marked the beginning of the Vietnamese refugee crisis. It is a constellation of videos, sculptures, and drawings that imagines drowned refugees reincarnated as corals, now threatened by warming waters and the extractive industry of the marine wildlife trade.