Ocean Vuong has always written as if language were something fragile you hold up to the light. His lines pause, listen, double back. They are alert to what survives, and what doesn’t. With his first public exhibition of photography, opening January 31 at CPW in Kingston, Vuong brings that same attentiveness into a visual register.
Readers of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous or Time Is a Mother will recognize the emotional weather of these photographs immediately. Vuong’s images linger in fluorescent-pink nail salons, modest domestic interiors, and other unremarked spaces of immigrant and working-class life. They are not documentary in the traditional sense. Nothing is explained. Nothing is staged for emphasis. Instead, the photographs operate the way his sentences do—quietly and obliquely.
At the center of the exhibition is a body of photographs of Vuong’s younger brother, made in the aftermath of their mother’s death. The images trace a period of care, grief, and tentative renewal, but they very much resist sentimentality. Vuong does not aestheticize loss so much as sit with it, allowing the camera to register the small, human negotiations of living on. In this way, the work echoes the moral seriousness of his writing: survival as an ongoing practice, not a victory parade.
Vuong has spoken about using photography as part of his writing process—another way of seeing when words falter. That sensibility is evident here. These photographs feel like notes taken in a different key, attentive to gesture, light, and proximity. A limited-edition artist’s book, co-published by CPW and 1080PRESS, brings his images and text into direct conversation, underscoring how porous the boundary between them has always been.
For an artist so closely associated with language, this exhibition offers a revealing shift in perspective. Vuong isn’t abandoning words. He’s listening to what remains when he sets them down. “Ocean Voung: Song” will be on exhibit through May 10. An opening reception will be held on January 31 from 5-8pm.
This article appears in January 2026.
