As an artist-scholar interested in social justice and cultural representation, my creative practices draws on my academic training, using art to raise issues and topics that are often marginalized. This is my personal hobby and I am just happy to share my artwork with others (but not AI!). You can click the pictures to see a larger view or version.
I drew this children’s picture book to combat the racist anti-migrant rhetoric of the Obama, Biden, and Trump years. Flipbook: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/cf07b7d448.html. PDF: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/longbui/files/2024/11/The-Camp-Long-Bui.pdf
Bui, Long T. Poem for “Refugee Bodily Orbits” Special Issue on Hurricane Katrina edited by Clyde Woods for American Quarterly 61:3 (2009): 829-830.
Bui, Long. “Earthly Kin.” Poem for The Muse: An International Journal of Poetry (December 2013)
I redesigned the cover image for this journal to indicate the threat of (post)racial difference within the silhouette of humanity.
Orange Afterlives. Oil painting on canvas. I made this to reflect on toxic landscapes in Vietnam intermixed with infected blood, bones, and bodies as a hellish legacy of the chemicals used by the US military during the war. The most famous of those herbicides, Agent Orange, destroyed farmland but its material effects stayed within people and children, leading to physical deformities.
Imposter Demon: Acrylic painting on canvas. It depicts the scary image of a person facing their own creativity and genius. We are often scared of our own power! Many of us have imposter syndrome and forced to “get over it” on a personal level, while also trying to pinpoint systemic and structural exclusion from institutions of power.
Super FOB Beauty Queen. Ink on canvas. I drew this for the FOB II Art Exhibit in Little Saigon to speak to gender hierarchies and commodified bodies. I write it about it in Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory. I believe art is supposed to provoke dialogue around the identity, politics, and expression.
Digital Art: Illustrated using one thumb through an app called Draw. It depicts the hanging trauma of South Vietnamese people and veterans forced into the communist reeducation camps that formed after the war.
Hand drawn on paper and digitally colored. I drew this as the cover for my book, Viral World: Global Relations during the COVID-19 Pandemic. I wanted to convey the chaos (and connectivity) I felt during this time.
Below: Digital art I made dedicated to frontline workers.
Left: Oil painting. I gifted this painting to a fierce femtor of mine (all the faculty who supervised or advised me for my BA/MA/PhD degrees were women of color) so this is a tribute to the hard work and emotional labor that these women do for marginalized underrepresented students and for the community.
Below: Digital art. Comic book cover made for Prof. Glenda Flores as a superhero take on her book Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture. Thinking about all the challenges that progressive Latina educators go through in and outside the academy, fighting for social justice and protecting the vulnerable.
I redesigned the image on the cover of the journal of Cultural Dynamics to reflect the special focus on race and post-raciality to imagine the sense of racial danger and threat that exists within the silhouette of interconnected humans.
Pretty decorate oil paintings I just made for my mentors and sister! Representing Vietnam’s beauty, which is increasingly damaged or harmed by climate change and industrial run-off.
Digital art: I produced this as the image for a scholarly project that documents the relationship between the University of California and exiled, minoritized communities. The UC promises refuge/asylum for many like myself, a first-generation college student, but I juxtapose this traditional understanding of higher ed with emerging work in critical university studies on the violence of the neoliberal university is and why we must push for collective bargaining rights over the academic politics of outsiderness,