Vivienne Le

Five Sisters

2019. Polyurethane automotive paint, plaster, cardboard. Dimensions variable.

Thesis Statement

The cliché holds that immigrants do the dirty work that Americans are not willing to do. In the Vietnamese-owned and operated nail salons that have become a ubiquitous part of the American retail landscape, it is a reality. Yet within the toxic fumes of solvents and the dust of cuticle detritus, the promise of the American Dream glimmers on a set of pristinely painted nails. For the Vietnamese diaspora my mother belongs to, nails are an emblem of upward mobility from the war-torn country they had fled. Today, this entrepreneurial success of an industry is total as it is culturally defining. The stereotypical “Asian Nail Lady” is not respected for the quality of her work but mocked for the comedy of her broken English, she is praised for her service rather than her skill.

Against the dominant political rhetoric that impugns the worth of an immigrant, “Five Sisters” is an attempt to generate dignified collective identities. I decontextualize service work by treating its practices as disciplined craft and artistry: as art-work. A set of sculptures abstracted from artificial nail shapes used in a manicure, each nail is scaled to the height of one of my four sisters and finished with automotive paint.

As the precursor to modern nail polish painting, automotive painting achieves its high-gloss only from an all-consuming labor of meticulous sanding, priming, sanding, basecoat, sanding, clearcoat, sanding, buffing, polishing, waxing, repeat. Painting was a hard-earned reward by painstaking bodywork. When these conventionally masculine techniques were applied on nails, I imagined this first surface encounter to have armored women with autonomy and agency. Thus each “Sister” is an auto body painted on a feminine body, their surfaces manicured by devotion to family, primed by dedication to hard work and polished into vehicles zooming towards a gleaming boundless beyond.

Exhibited at the Stanford University Coulter Gallery for the 2019 Undergraduate Honors Thesis Exhibition in Art Practice. Press release.

Related Press

Le, Khuyen. “Beautifying labor, celebrating craft: Vivienne Le’s ‘Five Sisters’.” Stanford Daily (Stanford) 26 Sept. 2019. link.

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