Midday Night
mixed media
2024
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)
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
_
work #1 - White-collar
(white shirts, hanger, strings, vinyl decal)
_
work #2 - A bunch of papers
(single-channel video projected onto a bunch of blank papers)
_
work #3 - Twenty-something
(projection on framed archival print)