Select photographs from ‘we were growers’ have been exhibited by Exposure Photography Festival and RBC Emerging Visual Artist Program at Arts Commons. The work has also won an emerging artist award at the 2023 Exposure Photography Festival in Calgary, AB.

Artist Statement

“we were growers” is an ongoing project by Danny Luong. The aim of this project has been to visit and photograph Vietnamese cannabis farms that exist in a ‘gray area’ within the law inside of interior British Columbia. I started the project with members of my extended family that funded and created these farms. Since then the project has expanded to encompass larger societal themes that exist growing up as a person of colour in Canada. Two central tenets that I have wrought out from the work after shooting for some time are the Vietnamese diaspora and Asian gang culture – what that looks like and how it is changing now that cannabis is legal. One of the key things that continues to draw me towards this work is the use of forests and tunnels as a ideological backdrop that exists in the Second Indochina War, and using that historical context to juxtapose images of Vietnamese men and women in the forests of interior BC growing cannabis. In the war, the Vietcong were known to hide their infantry in the jungle. With the very same tools and skillset, the Vietnamese now reside inside new forests and create complex subterranean tunnels and elaborate greenhouses for the pursuit of income. It is my hope that these photographs reveal a culture of hiding.