What makes a place home? Three Vietnamese artists offer different ways to look

More than an address

A family photograph can put a relative in view. A landscape can hold a remembered place. A textile can bring that place into the space where someone lives now.

Those are among the materials in Make it Home, a free exhibition organized by the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association, or VAALA, at Huntington Beach Art Center. Curated by An Lê and Brenda Huỳnh, it brings together Ann Lê, Hùng Việt Nguyễn and Thịnh Nguyễn.

For Little Saigon readers whose family histories cross more than one place, the exhibition offers a question rather than a single definition: what do people carry forward when they make a home?

There is limited time to visit. The Art Center lists the exhibition through Saturday, October 24, 2026, with Friday and Saturday gallery hours of noon to 5 p.m. VAALA’s announcement gives October 25 as the closing date; visitors considering Sunday should confirm with the venue rather than assume it will be open.

Family images, assembled across distance

The artists approach that question through different materials. In its exhibition guide, VAALA describes Ann Lê’s Home: Faux Family Photo Album as combining scanned family portraits from Vietnam with photographs of houses in Los Angeles.

The resulting album joins people and places that were not originally photographed together. The guide connects that process with questions about family history and what people inherit from places they may not have known themselves.

A landscape on canvas, a memory in cloth

Hùng Việt Nguyễn’s contribution shifts the view toward painting. VAALA’s guide describes a recurring relationship with nature, including moonlit figures and water in selected works.

Thịnh Nguyễn uses another route into remembered places. The exhibition guide says Return to Tây Ninh turns recollections of the southern Vietnamese countryside into layered textile patterns. An original gouache painting is displayed alongside the textiles, allowing visitors to see their connection.

Put next to the family album, these works make room for different meanings of home: a relationship, a landscape or something brought into everyday domestic life. That is the exhibition’s proposed conversation, not a claim that every viewer or Vietnamese family will read the works alike.

A possible conversation between generations

For a family visiting together, a concrete starting question could be which object, image or place each person associates with home. The exhibition provides material for that conversation without requiring everyone to share the same memory.

Plan a visit

• Venue: Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main Street, Huntington Beach, CA 92648.
• Closing date listed by the venue: Saturday, October 24, 2026.
• Friday and Saturday hours: Noon–5 p.m., California time.
• Admission: VAALA describes admission as free.
• Venue information: (714) 374-⁠1650.
• Website: huntingtonbeachartcenter.org.
• Exhibition guide: vaala.org — Make it Home.

Translation assisted by AI and reviewed by an editor.