PHUNG HUYNH

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Phung Huynh: Bite The Hand That Feeds You, the multidisciplinary artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring documentary-style drawings, paintings, and sculptural installations that honor immigrant experiences. The exhibition runs from September 12 through October 24, 2026. An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 12, from 4-7 pm. 

Bite The Hand That Feeds You presents new drawings, paintings, and sculptural installations centered on pink donut boxes—an iconic yet often overlooked artifact of Cambodian refugee labor in California and across the United States. Donut shops, frequently framed as success stories of refugee entrepreneurship, obscure the physical toll, racialized labor conditions, and intergenerational sacrifices that make such survival possible. Huynh reclaims the donut box as a charged container—one that holds sweetness alongside exhaustion, nostalgia alongside exploitation, and cultural memory alongside erasure. Rendered fragile, monumental, or emptied, these forms question who is feeding whom, who is consumed, and who is rendered disposable within capitalist and nationalist frameworks.

Food operates in Huynh’s work as a complex register of memory, intimacy, and obligation. Within refugee households, food is often the primary language of care, carrying histories of loss, adaptation, and survival across generations. Yet food is also labor—frequently feminized, racialized, and undervalued—performed under conditions shaped by displacement and economic precarity. In the context of anti-immigrant violence, this labor becomes even more precarious, as the threat of detention or deportation shadows everyday acts of survival. By invoking Cambodian-owned donut shops, Huynh situates food as both sustenance and site of struggle—where care persists despite systemic harm.

Huynh reconstitutes the well-known idiom “bite the hand that feeds you” as a powerful stance of both provocation and refusal. Reflecting on the context of the phrase’s original disciplinary tone, used to silence dissent, and maintain an expectation that refugees and immigrants accept rescue without complaint and perform gratitude in exchange for survival. This new body of work critiques U.S. foreign policy and refugee resettlement programs, exposing how state aid is often conditional and extractive. The metaphor collapses under the reality of anti-immigrant policies and the violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which targets the very communities whose labor sustains the economy. The true “hand” is not the state, but immigrants, refugees, and undocumented workers whose labor undergirds entire industries. To bite, then, is not an act of ingratitude, but a refusal to accept exploitation disguised as opportunity.