Alvin Luong 梁超洪

Corals of Bidong (2023-2025) imagines the drowning of Vietnamese refugees who attempted to reach Bidong Island and their reincarnation into corals that are now farmed below the waters of Bidong. Bidong is an island in Malaysia that served as a refugee camp following the end of the Vietnam War. The end of the conflict marked a time of desperation within a war-torn Vietnam that cascaded into a major refugee crisis where tens of thousands of people precariously fled Vietnam by means of the sea in search of sanctuary.

As the epicenter of the refugee crisis, Bidong was once the most densely populated place on the planet and where some refugees eventually granted resettlement to Canada and the United States of America from humanitarian refugee sponsorship programs. While refugees found new lives in the West through Bidong, many more refugees had drowned in their attempts to reach the remote island.

Today, the Bidong functions as a coral farm that was launched in 2003 after a decade-long closure of the refugee camp. The coral farm of Bidong made its first successful commercial export in 2016 to Canada and later to the United States. Through historical serendipity, the corals are now exported to the same places where the refugees had been resettled. It is through this poetic coincidence that the narrative and form of the artwork is derived from. The artwork proposes an alternative to the watery death of the refugees by means of reincarnation into corals that are now circulated globally through the marine wildlife trade.

Corals of Bidong is a part of a trilogy of films that includes Camp Atlanta and DEPHINETLY PARADISE. The project also encompasses photography, frottage drawings and sculptures.