“My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together”: Noelle Choy and Hùng Lê on Cultural Legibility
08.26.2025
My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together showcases 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award recipients Noelle Choy (Assistant Professor of Painting), Hùng Lê (’22 Fiber), and Merry Sun.
On view August 26, 2025–January 4, 2026 at the Spencer Museum of Art.
Images by Ryan Waggoner, © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas
Noelle Choy is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice resists easy categorization.
Working primarily in sculpture, her pieces can exist between performance and objecthood. Sometimes they function as props from a film and other times as characters reimagined from narrative or video. Her work embraces reenactment and reanimation, striking a balance between playfulness and the weight of intergenerational grief.
“There's a lot of replication and mirroring and cut-out stuff that connects to each other,” Choy says. “I wouldn't say any of the sculptures exist or hold everything singularly. They very much relate to the other things, kind of in the backdrop of the film as it'll be shown in the gallery.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, interrupting herself on the video call. “My dog is going to bark. I can see the look in his eyes.”
Choy is preparing for the opening of My Mother's Tongue Ties Me Together, on view August 26, 2025–January 4, 2026, at the Spencer Museum of Art (1301 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, Kansas). The exhibition follows her recognition as a recipient of the 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award, which honors the achievements of contemporary artists living and working in the Kansas City area.
Awardees receive an unrestricted cash prize along with the opportunity to present their work in a prominent museum setting. The Spencer Museum of Art will host the exhibition, featuring Choy alongside fellow 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award recipients Hùng Lê and Merry Sun.
Both Hùng Lê and Noelle Choy have strong ties to the Kansas City Art Institute. Lê graduated from the Fiber department in 2022, while Choy is an Assistant Professor in the Painting department. For the upcoming exhibition, the two describe aspects of an unplanned collaboration, with their films installed in symbolic dialogue, positioned opposite one another in the gallery space.
“And it’s all being supported or working in tandem with the actual pieces on the wall,” Choy says. “So we all came together instead of trying to overconceptualize it. I felt like there was a lot already there, like accidentally choreographed in a way.”
“And that’s why the exhibition’s title, My Mother's Tongue Ties Me Together, offers a level of ambiguity,” Lê says. “You can’t really predict what the work will look like, which connects thematically to what we were exploring.”
Choy had previously used a variation of the phrase for another piece, and the group liked how it suggested that all the work is shaped by similar influences, even if the resulting themes are quite different. Rather than directly referencing migration or identity, they focused on ideas of cultural legibility and lineage.
“I also thought about how the title reflects the difficulty of articulating what we’re trying to say. In that way, being tongue-tied felt like a funny way to describe it.”
Fiber Memory
Using indigo dye alongside techniques such as laser engraving, embroidery, and beading, Hùng Lê creates fiber works that explore memory, death, funerary practices, and weddings. The work examines the ethics of viewing bodies of color, raising questions about who is memorialized and who is not. It also interrogates the structures of archives and the specific languages and tools used to preserve that information.
“There are a lot of parallels in terms of what’s happening currently compared to what happened during the American War in Vietnam, and how the numbers are memorialized today. I think this, in many ways, is a continuation of its aftermath,” Lê said.
The foundation of his work lies in examining photographs, particularly family photographs, and using them as a starting point to explore how museums and institutions retain information compared with how individuals and communities preserve it. But his new work is pushing forward this practice in new ways.
“A lot of my earlier work highlighted the subjects in each piece using various embroidery techniques,” Lê said. “However, for this exhibition, I wanted to challenge myself by obscuring the subjects. It’s almost the opposite of what I’ve done before. The embroidery patterns create this hiding and revealing dynamic between the subject and the background, often intertwining them together instead.”
While Lê is meticulous in his practice and particular in his materials, Noelle Choy is indiscriminate, using different colors and textures. “That’s a major reason why I was so drawn to her work,” he says. “She can utilize anything, and there’s a very high level of spontaneity and intuition that I really gravitate toward.”
Here is the path leading Choy to the Kansas City Art Institute. She went to Virginia Commonwealth University for her undergraduate degree, majoring in Sculpture and Extended Media. For the next five years she lived in Brooklyn before attending graduate school for Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She came to KCAI through an AICAD Teaching Fellowship which lasted for two years. She is now in her second year as non-fellow faculty.
Within the Painting Department, she teaches sophomores along with experimental, special-topic electives. For example, she previously taught a course on experimental color theory and, this fall, is offering a class on “the invisible.”
“I remember what it felt like to do a reading and not understand anything that was happening. That really informs the way I interact with my students. I feel really obligated to show them cool things that people are doing,” Choy says.
She also seeks to cut through the frightening elements of a career in the arts.
“And like these words that seem intimidating, like networking and proposals, that's just like hanging out with people. The art world is fluid and the art world is not just like one thing, right? It's like ecosystems,” she says.
Discovered Community
Lê says this is an important point. During his undergrad, Lê’s primary interactions were with predominantly white audiences, where he often struggled to find nuanced critiques and felt compelled to overexplain his work. More recently, within his discovered community, he finds that the intended subtleties are recognized more quickly.
He started asking himself, “Who am I making this for?” It was a question that allowed him to move his practice in new directions.
Choy says, “There were a lot of things we already understood about each other’s work, things that didn’t need to be explained. I feel there’s a difference between someone else telling me that my work is something versus me saying it as a non-white artist. When it comes to identity politics and artmaking, what’s said often depends on who is talking about the work versus like when the three of us are in conversation together.”
She says, “I think those roles are very important, right?”
For example, her 30-minute short film for My Mother's Tongue Ties Me Together centers on her brother and aunt, following them to create a deconstructed documentary about the life of Choy’s mother as she immigrated to the Bay Area.
“I'm a little protective or sensitive about it just because it sounds just like it's like, ‘Oh, it's an immigration story.’ But it's actually just my aunt telling stories as we drive places. So it's really funny and it's also incredibly heartbreaking because it undulates in these really extreme ways,” she says.
“And the sculptures that go with it are really different from other work I’ve made.” Compared to the time and attention demanded, it’s easy to see how a quick glance in the gallery might miss the deeper undercurrents of her practice, overshadowed by an initial impression of lightness or playfulness.
At the same time, Choy and Lê say it’s been pointed out that both of their short films use similar framing mechanisms. The artists say the effect of the enormous screens showing their work across from one another acts as something of an “activation,” videos acting as literal, physical, and conceptual backdrops for the work.
“It’s on loop, infinitely. You don't know where you're gonna start. Maybe it feels silly. But a lot of the performances and projects are very heavily narrativized or orchestrated in a very particular way that I think it takes time to watch or understand,” she says.
Choy’s dog, a Great Pyrenees/Australian Shepherd mix, sits calmly at the end of the video call. His relaxed demeanor, she explains, comes from getting used to the conversation plus the bunch-worth of bananas he’s eaten along the way. “It’s the only frozen fruit I have right now,” she laughs.