An Artist Caught Between Two Floods

As has been all too visible in the tossed wreckage of homes and devastation of whole neighborhoods from the recent storm, floods ravage what they consume into fragments, pulling away some things and leaving the rest in disorder ready for decay. Although Phong Bui’s current exhibition at Show Room, Work According to the Rail, Part I (After the Flood), was planned before Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, it features 25 collage paintings mostly created after a flood in the artist and Brooklyn Rail publisher’s studio this past August that destroyed roughly 20 percent of his work. Unfortunately, Bui was also hit hard by Sandy just a day after the opening at Show Room, telling Hyperallergic that his Greenpoint studio was “decimated” by flooding that rose from the Newtown Creek. In a message on the Brooklyn Rail site, Bui stated that “Sandy’s assault destroyed the bulk of my work from the last 25 years, as well as most of the Rail’s selected archives,” but that “New Yorkers weathered 9/11, and I myself survived the war and labor camp in Vietnam. I believe we will all rise above this time with a greater purpose in life and art.” READ MORE