Alvin Luong 梁超洪

Corals of Bidong (2023-2025) reimagines the drowning of Vietnamese refugees who attempted to reach Bidong Island through 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 the country by means of the sea in search of sanctuary.

Today, Bidong is now host to a marine research center operated by the University of Malaysia Teregganu as well as a private-public commercial 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 in subsequent years to the United States. Through historical serendipity, the corals are exported to the same places where the refugees had been resettled. It is through this poetic coincidence that the artwork derives its form and narrative. 

The artwork proposes an alternative to the watery death of refugees by means of reincarnation into corals that now circulate globally as commodities in the marine wildlife trade, providing the means for traversing borders with more ease than what a migrant refugee may face. In the artwork, both corals and refugees are metaphors for each other yet remain distinct with their own crises. The narrative of Corals of Bidong also reflects the contemporary crisis of ocean warming that afflicts the corals that surround Bidong with mass death that is widely visible in through the fields of bleached corals that surround the island. The coral, like the refugee, can no longer live in their home environs and require new habitats to survive. This material reality recasts the commodity trading of the corals from Bidong into a process that inadvertently provides sanctuary.

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