Small Freedoms
photography
currently ongoing
A photographic diary of urban life in Saigon and Vung Tau. Thinking about our needs for beauty and freedom, and how we seek them in the crevices of our cities.
So Good
artist’s book
2022
So Good is an intimate book object meant to be viewed page by page. Delicate risograph prints, quickly printed using duotones, unfold a sequence of lush, vernacular landscapes on the road, in Saigon, where couples go to fall in love. The diaristic nature of the work seeks to situate personal history in the rapid development of the city - how tenderness finds its way along roads, abandoned constructions, rare green spaces, and other sites.

Completed during residency with Wedogood - a creative design and risograph studio in Ho Chi Minh City

Medium: Ceramic box with risograph prints
Dimensions: 6 cm x 11 cm x 8 cm (W x L x H)


Exhibition views:
Our Love Utopia
documentary short
2020-2021
Dating apps pervade globally. For a generation innately able to summarize ourselves in a few words and pictures for the online audience, is intimacy at all within our reach? Our Love Utopia [documentary film] seeks such ponderance through an exercise with young people in Ho Chi Minh City. Posing a hypothetical question - a dating app on which users would be represented as bedrooms? - the project uses imagination and conversation as vehicles towards deeper connections.

Completed with support from the SMFA Dean’s Research Award

Medium: single channel video
19 minutes
Trailer linked here

Film stills:


Our Love Utopia [open edition] (2021):
In my online residency with Bay Library during Vietnam’s 2021 COVID-19 lockdown, I expanded the project into a participatory one, in which Instagram users could sign up to join the “dating app.” Users filled out an online form describing what their bedrooms would look like on the “app.” Afterwhich, I rendered their ideas into 3DCG videos. These videos were posted anonymously onto the library’s IG account, where any users could match with someone by messaging us. Through connecting anonymous profiles that shared no name, gender, nor age, the project also seeked to expand our notion of connecction especially in a time of isolation.

Open edition video stills:

Film poster:
A green mountains school
short film
2022
A green mountains school is my last autobiographical work reflecting on a fraught coming-of-age in a foreign landscape. By way of rebuilding a world and reenacting my stories from within it, I seek to reconcile with past naiveties and trauma.

Film stills: