Collection

Sublime & Fragile

Water is central to Vietnamese identity. I want to examine it closely, to understand its ultimate softness. Something that can permeate and pass through everything, nourish everything, also can destroy everything.
Thus, water becomes central to my practice. From it, related symbols gradually come into focus. The river. Instability. Erosion. Decay. Riverbank dynasties. Currents. Migration. I do not entirely trust these images; instead, I question why they keep returning to my mind and into my dreams.
This must be an inherited obsession. My father had a peculiar stubbornness regarding the Red River. He insisted, almost superstitiously, that only the alluvial side was good land, land worth inhabiting. I grew up moving between a village, a small town, and then Hanoi. Wherever we went, by my father’s will, we had to live near a river. I often walked along its banks, unconsciously absorbing his devotion.
Now I live in New Orleans, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River. America, too, is a nation of immigrants. Life here feels both foreign and strangely familiar, as if the same story were being told again, only in a different language.
Since childhood, I have positioned myself as a migrant. From the countryside to a provincial town, gradually toward the capital, and now to the United States. My heart constantly turns toward home; yet in truth, I do not fully know what that place is, or whether it can ever truly be “found” again.
I feel as though I am always standing on a shifting river. It is a place where things are simultaneously held and eroded, solid and dissolving. It is the terrain where forms are born, only to be carried away by the water.
Within this current, we are always experiencing loss. It may sound sorrowful, but sometimes this awareness is precisely what encourages us to live more gently — with one another, with nature, and with all living beings.