Ocean Vuong Has a Hartford Homecoming With Photo Exhibit: “I’m Sorry I Love You”

Following his debut photography exhibition, Sống, earlier this year, Ocean Vuong has returned to Hartford, in a homecoming exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Born in Vietnam and raised in the Hartford area, the acclaimed poet, essayist, novelist, and educator unveils a twenty-year archive of portraiture, landscape, and snapshots of documented queer and immigrant life in the Connecticut River Valley in I’m Sorry I Love You. The exhibition is part of Wadsworth’s MATRIX series, a rotating program that spotlights contemporary artists who challenge conventional notions of art and its possibilities. 

EnVi attended the exhibition’s opening reception and artist talk, where Vuong joined Dr. Quan Tran in a conversation about the exhibition’s roots and the communities that shaped his upbringing and work. 

The Photograph’s Performance

The exhibition features 44 photographic works, some printed and mounted directly onto the walls, while others hang as silk flags from clotheslines. Vuong affirmed that the unconventional display was intentional, designed to resemble a work in progress. “It should look not unlike an artist studio or the way one would put up one’s favorite images in one’s bedroom,” he explained. 

Danielle Drees, the exhibition’s curator, described the careful consideration that went into dividing the gallery space — encouraging viewers to slow down and pause as they move through the exhibition. Drees noted that the clothesline evokes an everyday image while also creating a visual connection between a photograph of the Puerto Rican flag and an adjacent image of Vuong and his brother holding the American flag.

Vuong further explained that the photographs are positioned to perform, inviting viewers to experience the gallery as a space of movement and change. The silk flags flutter as visitors pass by, introducing movement into the space. He was particularly drawn to the way the silk might unravel over time, its gradual disintegration gesturing toward the exhibition’s larger theme of impermanence. “To me, the exhibition is similar to a reading,” Vuong said. “You can give many readings in many rooms, but after a while, the air takes the voice back and the emptiness is what’s there.”

The Grammar of Photography

Before writing, photography was Vuong’s first artistic practice. Over the past two decades, it has continued to inform his writing while becoming a medium he sees as both distinct from and intimately connected to the written word.

His interest in photography grew from documenting skate and punk culture in his late teens, where he began photographing his friends in motion. He further developed his practice by frequenting the small photography section of his local community college library, studying photographers he would come to revere such as Daido Moriyama, Chris Killip, Sally Mann, and Luigi Ghirri.

“There was a dynamism that I would only much later learn as a poet, that you often see inside the haiku, or the sonnet… The elimination of the world created another narrative,” Vuong explained. He compared the camera to a hole puncher, puncturing moments in time while leaving the world around them intact. “In writing, you have to manifest everything… The writing demands you to make everything possible. The photograph asks of you to see and give a frame to what’s already there. The photographer must say to the world, ‘after you.’”

During the artist talk, Vuong illustrated this distinction in a photograph of his mother inside a nail salon, captured as she rises to greet a customer at the door. Her body is blurred, embodying the simultaneous states of rest and labor. While a sentence moves linearly, the photograph can hold multiple moments at once.

The exhibition’s title, I’m Sorry I Love You, was inspired by a phrase written on a pipe at a skate park. Its linguistic ambiguity evokes multiple possible meanings. Depending on how one reads or speaks the phrase, where a comma is placed, or where one pauses, the sentence can become an expression of regret, longing, or confession. “All of that ambivalence is both in language and in the photograph,” said Vuong. “And so, it became a wonderful way to understand the openness of form.” 

Reframing the American Experience

Much like Vuong’s writing, the exhibition grapples with themes of class, labor, the American experience, and autobiography.

He recalled hearing his friends in college talk about their parents taking them on picnics in the park, which led him to the sobering realization that he had never seen his mother walk through a park, despite living next to one in their East Hartford home. “Her life was nail salon, grocery store, bank, and on her weekend, she’d go to the mall.”

These personal memories form part of what Vuong describes as a “communal autobiography,” using photography to complicate conventional perceptions of the American experience. He sought to articulate his own, as well as his mother’s, queer, rural, and working-class American experiences. “A lot of my work is giving form to that American experience, not to resolve it, but to allow it a kind of dignified presence through absence.”

This autobiographical impulse extends beyond Vuong’s own family, opening onto questions of visibility and absence. Vuong and Tran both contemplated the experience of encountering Vietnamese bodies primarily through images of war. By repositioning a body beyond violence — in rest, play, and everyday moments — the camera becomes a means of self-recognition. “Why am I only recognizable to myself in this country when I have been rendered a corpse to the point where sometimes we’re piled in such a way that it’s hard to distinguish one body from another?” Vuong asked. “And so, I think having that legibility repositioned in life, and framed with a kind of deliberateness that the camera affords, is a moment that is deeply tense, but fruitfully capacious for me.”

What Flows And Remains

The materiality of photography also became a way for Vuong to examine class and artistic imperfection. During his adolescence and young adulthood, film was costly to develop, limiting what could be captured, what was deemed worthy of the technology, and what was left outside the frame. Looking back at the few family photographs his family could afford, Vuong noted that they were carefully curated through framing, positioning, and expression. “The greatest opulence was the candid frame.”

Yet Vuong’s work embraces the candid, finding significance in the unglamorous and imperfect unfolding of everyday life. His images carry multiple currents, holding a fluid relationship with time and memory — distinguishing moments that are both fleeting and persistent.

Vuong’s first photography exhibition, Sống, means “to live” in Vietnamese. Altering the tone mark can transform the word into sông, meaning “river,” or sóng, meaning “waves,” revealing the multiplicity embedded within the language. These layered meanings resonate with the Wallace Stevens quotation etched above Vuong’s photographs: “The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.” 

Like the river itself, I’m Sorry I Love You meditates on what endures and what slips away, tracing the lives of Vuong, his family, and the communities rooted in the Connecticut River Valley as they continue to exist, flow, and circulate through one another.

I’m Sorry I Love You can be viewed at the Wadsworth Atheneum until January 27, 2027. Tickets can be found at the museum’s website. You can also follow Ocean Vuong’s work on his Instagram!

Looking for more conversations with your favorite authors? Check out EnVi’s conversation with YA author Angelica Cheng on her debut novel The Fast Track!