Workshop: Reading the news otherwise
US-based interdisciplinary artist Hương Ngô leads a workshop exploring how texts can be collectively transformed into critical and empathic investigations of social reality.
Ngô will lead a hands-on workshop using techniques adapted from Newspaper Theatre, a method developed by Augusto Boal and the Arena Theatre of São Paulo as part of Theatre of the Oppressed. The premise is simple and radical: any non-dramatic text (ie a news report, a document, a press release) can be collectively transformed into a critical and empathic investigation of social reality.
Working together, we will experiment with a selection of these techniques, which may include complementary reading (restoring what the article leaves out), crossed reading (setting two contradictory stories against each other), the concretion of the abstract (giving body and weight to terms the news flattens into cliché), and text out of context. Through these methods we will read our chosen articles against the grain, attending to whose voices are centred, whose are omitted, and how intersectional feminist analysis might reframe what we think we already know.
No performance experience is necessary, and no one will be asked to do anything they are not comfortable with.
Please bring: two or three news articles (print or digital) that you find important, troubling, or unresolved in some way. They can be recent or historical, local or international. These will form the raw material for the workshop, so choose pieces you are willing to sit with and take apart.
The 2026 Sydney Asian Art Series is convened by Yvonne Low and Natalie Seiz, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
People
Hương Ngô
Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary, research-based artist. She was born in Hong Kong, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies (2004), and was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow (2011-2012). She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for work that has been described as "deftly and defiantly decolonial" by New City and "what intersectional feminist art looks like'' by the Chicago Tribune. She works across mediums, traversing borders and making connections through differences. At once intimate and political, Ngô’s practice listens for what remains.
She has exhibited her solo and collaborative work at numerous international institutions including the MoMA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Para Site in HK, The Factory in Ho Chi Minh City, and Nhà Sàn Collective in Hanoi. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, DePaul Art Museum, Smith College, Colorado College, University of California Irvine, and Walker Art Center, among others. She was part of the Prague Biennial in 2005 and Prospect.5 Triennial in 2021. She is a lecturer at the University of California Santa Barbara and co-founder of Tiger Balm, an archive of conversations between artists of the Asian diaspora.
Photo credit: Leonard Suryajaya
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