Long Live Tourism! Cigarette Campaign is a fictitious, three-part advertising campaign that draws inspiration from actual cigarettes I purchased while visiting Vietnam as a tourist – an experience that added another layer to my complex relationship with identity and belonging. In addition to a series of black & white photos and a performance documentation video, this first part of the series features two color posters where I embody an anonymous female figure smoking Tourism/Du Lịch cigarettes – one wearing a traditional Vietnamese nón sunhat, another in silk robes amid swirling smoke.
Having moved to Berlin from the US in the mid-1990s as an Amerasian of Vietnamese descent, I inhabited a unique position of multiplicity. While Germans often asked “But where are you really from?” – a common microaggression revealing assumptions about belonging – my identity as half-Vietnamese, American-raised, and Berlin-transplant created complex layers of insider/outsider status. This intersection of identities gave me a particular lens through which to observe and experience the city’s post-reunification dynamics.
During this period, many Vietnamese contract workers in East Berlin faced precarious situations, with some turning to informal economies, including cigarette smuggling. Government anti-smoking campaigns often targeted these communities, contributing to a shift in public perception of Vietnamese immigrants from war refugees to participants in illicit activities. My position as someone of partial Vietnamese heritage, yet culturally American, created a nuanced perspective on these stereotypes and stigmas.
The work engages with themes of voyeurism and exoticization, deliberately appropriating stigmatized imagery to challenge prevailing narratives. By transforming the act of smoking into a vehicle for seduction and desire, the series plays with projections of identity—both my own and those imposed upon me. It blurs the lines between critique and complicity, attraction and repulsion, examining how cultural identity becomes packaged and consumed.
Through these layered meanings, Long Live Tourism! Cigarette Campaign – 1: Color Posters invites viewers to examine their own perceptions and the cultural constructs that shape allure and aversion. By inhabiting multiple positions simultaneously – tourist and native, critic and participant, subject and object—the work reveals that there is no single, simple narrative of “otherness” – each of us carries our own set of cultural complexities and contradictions.
Images produced in collaboration with Andreas Bohn.
