Group Exhibit, Prograde & Retrograde
Artist Statement
Within my conceptual framework, I investigate my cultural identity and familial background by connecting with my family’s culture, religion, history, and language. Through my installation piece, I recreate an environment that possesses traces of my family’s past to demonstrate how Vietnamese culture and values are transferred, maintained, and practiced in contemporary U.S.
Through found objects and familial artifacts, my current work focuses on constructing a family dining room to signify how family meals establish cultural traditions that can extend from generation to generation. Family dinners are key to building culture because each member can connect, communicate, and share their unique backgrounds. I better understood fragments of my family’s experiences in Vietnam as well as their difficulties adapting to America thanks to their stories. To construct my dining space, I transferred personal artifacts from my home to the new installation space. Then, I replicated my mother’s cooking through appropriating found objects. Using text, the “noodles” and “ice cubes” became an important conversational narrative that provided notions of identity, culture, and memory. Unlike my mother’s method of cooking, preparing my own “fake” meals provided a unique perspective of the preparation process and a familiar sense of childhood nostalgia. By presenting personal recorded conversations with my family along with historical photographs I make the audience feel as if though they are a part of the work, welcoming them into the space. Because I have not fully experienced Vietnam, I project the same feeling of cultural diaspora with the audience by simulating a unique conversation and dining tradition.
Group Exhibit, Reverberate
Artist Statement
As someone born in Orlando, I always thought of Florida as a place I called home. Thirteen years ago, I visited Vietnam for the first time. I felt displaced, lost, scared, and frustrated in a place I knew nothing about. Strangers spoke gibberish, buildings without windows welcomed uninvited guests, and violence often ensued out in the open. I never wanted to go back after experiencing a poverty-driven society, yet at some point, I knew I had to return to Vietnam in search for my “other origin.” Within my conceptual framework, I investigate my cultural identity in order to understand my relation to my familial background and origin. These aspects involve connecting with culture, religion, history, and language. While investigating notions of cultural identity, I want to also educate viewers about a personal and global perspective about the Asian world, specifically about Vietnam and how other major Asian countries like China, Korea, and Japan influence Vietnam. This includes a historical and colonial look toward the familiar and unfamiliar as inspired by Orientalism by Edward Said, Michael Bühler-Rose’s series Constructing the Exotic, and Maika Elan’s personal photographs of contemporary Vietnam.
In my works, I attempt to recreate myself in the place my parents lived for most of their lives. By listening to their tales about their life in Vietnam and their perilous escape to America, I realize their history and blood will forever flow through me, to be passed through generation to generations. Vietnamese food, music, and cultural events (including Chinese New Year and the Buddha’s birthday) are examples of ways my family practice cultural preservation in contemporary America. With my specialization in both traditional and digital media, which includes printmaking, calligraphy, graphic design, and photography, my artistic process focuses on combining both archived historical elements with contemporary images. By fusing past and present, I recreate new diverse messages that involve a personal critical analysis of my identity and origin; the purpose is to overall highlight cultural expression, duality, unification, and evolution. From this, I hope to highlight the integral differences between contemporary life here in America vs Vietnam, or at least the cultural differences regarding how my life was constructed through Americanized institutions and familial Asian influences.