Midday Night
mixed media
2024
Midday Night is a body of work that reflects on my father’s arrest amidst Vietnam's “blazing furnace.” The artifacts he left behind provided a lens through which I examine the paradoxes of a socialist-oriented market economy.

Each piece begins with an artifact found in his absence: a stack of legal papers, a photograph from when he was twenty-something, and poems written in his youth. I see my artmaking as both a process of mourning and an inquiry into how one can be a product of and a casualty of the same system.

I am interested in creating an emotional space where the murkiness of political reality is confronted with personal grief. For this, I work with the immateriality of light and the weight of text. In A bunch of papers, a video of me balancing precariously on a boat is projected onto a stack of paper. In a hushed voiceover, I recite my father’s convoluted, bureaucratic legal documents—a tension between the tangible evidence and the intangible truths of a flawed system. Similarly, his poem of self-aware ambition and fear of being depleted by desire in Twenty-something - (the age at which he wrote the poem) becomes an ephemeral projection that only comes into focus with the viewer’s touch. This gesture is an invitation to share in the difficult act of tracing the entanglement of personal agency within the currents of history.

In White collar, the uniform of Vietnam’s emerging middle class is transformed. Two shirts merge into a single, relaxed sculptural form, suspended as if in a moment of rest. Paired with his poem on the harsh realities of work, the piece serves as a quiet elegy for a generation's fragile aspirations and the compromises made to secure a future.


Exhibition views from peace is a white room, VAC, Hanoi in 2024



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work #1 - White-collar
(white shirts, hanger, strings, vinyl decal) 
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work #2 - A bunch of papers
(single-channel video projected onto a bunch of blank papers)
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work #3 - Twenty-something
(projection on framed archival print)

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:
In the Ebb and Flow
photobooks
2014-2024
In the Ebb and Flow is a self-narrative photobook project, reflecting on the acts of recording, editing, and narrating one’s life through photography.

These images are selected from the 03 books of the project, taken over six years of my adolescence, moving between the United States and Vietnam. They are documents of myself, and of the liminal spaces and people that shaped my lives.

In book-making, these photographs enable me to reflect and share my emotional growth, and overcoming of uprootedness.
 


With any luck, the first three books will be self-published in 2024.