Through Young Eyes - Jacquelyn Ngo

 ‘Through Young Eyes’ is an exhibition of over 30 paintings now showing at the Casula Powerhouse Museum. Their painter is Jacquelyn Ngo, a six-year-old Australian-Vietnamese girl who goes to school in Cabramatta West.

Once you get over the initial shock of Jacquelyn’s age, and that intimidating feeling of deep inadequacy makes its way back into the dark crevices of your mind, you can then begin to immerse yourself in the energy and vibrancy of these magnificent canvases. Hung in succession along the two walls of a narrow hallway on the old Powerhouse’s second floor, the van Gogh-esque works reveal the unhindered imaginative world of a carefree and vivacious child who, beyond painting what she sees, paints the way in which she sees her surroundings. By the end of my journey down the short corridor I was almost in tears by the honesty and unabashed sincerity of the paintings. The innocence, pure creativity and lack of agenda of this body of work is not only refreshing, but also allows one to experience the genuine joy of looking and being immersed in Jacquelyn’s enchanting world.

Her subjects are the everyday people and places which inhabit her life; friends, school, her apartment block, the beach, her family, herself. Yet they are bathed in a delightful pallet of intense colour and bold brushstrokes; never in any ‘realistically-painted’ setting, but rather in an imagined swirl of colours, and light, and koalas sitting on a Christmas-trees-filled beach. In a nostalgically familiar self-portrait, Jacquelyn lies daydreaming on a grassy hill, against a sky of pink and purple hues, while her Maths homework lies, neglected, by her side.

But more than being an indulgent and overblown colouring book, Jacquelyn’s body of work also express how the young artist is proud of her hybrid heritage. Many of the paintings reveal a beautifully innocent and organic fusion of Vietnamese and Australian culture. In ‘Flowering’, Jacquelyn and her mother are wearing the traditional Vietnamese ao dai as they stand in a garden which contains an Australian flag on a pole, the iconic Australian sun, and a koala in a tree.

This exhibition is heart-warming and promising in so many ways, and the Casula Powerhouse must be commended for giving such credibility and regard to the work of a young artist from the area. Jacquelyn’s paintings are not solely the product of a young girl with skills and perceptions exceeding her years. Beyond that, they represent the wealth of unfounded talent that exists in all sections of society, and which can be discovered when the surfaces of the unlikeliest of places are scratched. [Images from http://www.smh.com.au/]