March 23 - 26
Erased Monet (side-by-side comparison)
2021
MDF, approx. 30x24x1/2 in.
To Destroy an Image
2020
oil and paint stripper on unstretched canvas, 18x18 in.
Artist Statement
As a first-generation Vietnamese immigrant artist, I draw from concepts of translation, memory, cultural symbols, affect theory, materiality, and research on Vietnamese histories to convey frictions at the intersection of cultural identity, personal trauma, colonial fragments, and transnationalism. My interdisciplinary practice employs experimentation and material transformation to combine my personal perspectives and research on postcolonial transnationalism. My painting background helps me pay attention to the color scheme in my work, both as phenomenology and as a signifier of meaning. Having lived across three continents, I am interested in popular cultural symbols, subversive translation, and the global circulation of artworks and images. I aim to make my work legible to multiple audiences (Western and non-Western) and offer an open-ended complexity within its postcolonial narrative.
My work acknowledges oil painting as the point of colonial contact between Vietnam and the French in the 1920s. The use of oil painting in my work questions the role of oil painting in Vietnam as well as what it means to be a contemporary Vietnamese artist. This work accompanies by my research into Vietnamese art and cultural archives. My ethnographic approach goes against the grain of the Western art historical canon to embrace these fragments of archives.