JAMES NGUYEN + DR JOHN GOULD UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE

The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) is delighted to introduce James Nguyen as the exceptional ANAT Synapse 2025 artist in residence.

James’ project, Diasporic Amphibians, is a collaborative project exploring the biological, social, and evolutionary impact of frog communities that have become geographically separated and isolated. The consequences of habitat disturbance and disease burden may be reshaping how frog communities might be undergoing distinct ecological pressures and even biological differentiations that could be conceptualised as a diasporic experience.

The Green and Golden Bell Frog once abundant across the Southeastern Seaboard of Australia has dwindled, now surviving in small isolated pockets including at Homebush Bay, Kooragang and Broughton Islands.

Coincidentally, many Southeast Asian migrant communities fleeing the war in Vietnam have been resettled around Parramatta River, Duck River and the suburbs near Homebush Bay. During this period, herbicides like Dioxins – the precursors of Agent Orange – were extensively used to destroy almost a quarter of the rainforests and farmlands in South Vietnam. Not widely known is Australia’s large-scale production, stockpiling, and testing of Agent Orange throughout this war. To this day, the chemical remnants from the manufacturing of these chemical weapons now buried, continues to slowly seep into the water as chemical leachates.

Accumulating up the food chain, Dioxins remain a lingering legacy of Australia’s chemical weapons industry.

Ironically, surviving in these contaminated waters, the endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog has thrived at Homebush Bay, perhaps because of these chemical leachates. It is proposed that the Chytrid fungal disease that have decimated frog populations elsewhere are being control by the chemicals at Homebush Bay. This isolated frog population, like the refugee communities that have resettled in the area, are thriving despite sharing a common legacy of industrial contamination and environmental disturbance.

As part of the ANAT Synapse program, residents create online creative research journals, these serve as unique live documents of the residency and as a cultural artefact.

read James' creative research journal

This project spends time in the field with Dr John Gould from the University of Newcastle to record the calls and markings between two primary surviving populations of Green and Golden Bell Frogs.

James and John are interested in photographing and recording the skin coloration and marking changes that are slowly emerging between separated populations at Homebush and Newcastle. The second part of their research involves recording the mating calls of these two populations to ascertain whether there are ‘linguistic’ changes that might imply if these diasporic population of frogs can still understand one another or are developing unique new mating calls.

The project poses new animal-human-landscape relationships that can counter the cultural isolation of migrant and refugee communities who live close to, and often unseen contact with these similarly isolated frog populations.

James Nguyen was born in Bảo Lộc, Việt Nam. He is currently based in Murrumbeena (close to where the Boyds once ran their pottery studios). Nguyen’s work engages with reMatriation, decolonial thinking and language-brokering. He makes memes, performances, film, sculpture and installations that draw attention to the diasporic absurd. 

James has shown both ground-breaking and lacklustre work at institutions including ACCA, MCA, NGV, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, 4A, and Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art.

Dr. John Gould is a conservation and animal behaviour scientist at the University of Newcastle. Currently, John’s research focus is on the conservation of the threatened green and golden bell frog, Litoria aurea, including ways to manage key threatening process such as habitat modification and invasive species.

The ANAT Synapse residency program is supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and the University of Newcastle (UoN).

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