- Kích thước - 19x27 (cm)
- Chất liệu - Màu nước trên giấy
- Năm sáng tác - 2021
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The Red River has been a familiar presence to me since childhood.
From the moment I first began to form memories, I was already living near the river.
One of the very first sorrows I ever felt was when I accompanied my mother to the riverbank to see my father off — he was leaving for Laos for work.
We only saw him off at the ferry dock. After crossing to the other side, he would catch a long-distance coach over the Trường Sơn Mountains into Laos.
To my three-year-old mind, the Red River felt like a river of parting — and the far shore, a strange foreign land that had taken my father away for months.
One of my greatest childhood joys, too, was waiting at that ferry dock to welcome him home.
He would bring back all sorts of delicious treats — once even a child-sized bicycle with bright pink plastic spokes, bold and striking.
No one else in the village had a bike like that. It was my pride and joy throughout my early years.That’s why, when I try to paint imagined landscapes — places I’ve seen many times in dreams, like some sacred temple in my mind — I often paint the river, or a ferry landing.
There’s something hopeful in those images, but also something tinged with longing.
When I received the prompt for the Fairy–Dragon exhibition, I immediately thought of recreating the Red River’s landscape in the form of a votive painting.My two most recent oil paintings also depict a ferry landing — or the Red River shimmering faintly in the background.
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One of the first words I learned was “củ cải” (radish), but back then, because I mispronounced things, I said “tục tặc” instead. Even after I grew up, my mom would still playfully call it by that name, saying with a fond smile: “Let’s make some tục tặc for little Tồ today.”
Chubby white tục tặc is a childhood wrapped in Mom’s love.
This past spring, Mom grew a lot of tục tặc — fat, sweet, and all twisted into funny shapes. To me, those tục tặc were beautiful and full of imagination. More evocative than even a nude model.
