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Why are my eyes closed? I'm crying, I'm reflecting, I'm upset, I'm taking a moment to pause in a busy marketplace, I'm dreaming, I'm simply looking down because I don't want my dad taking another picture of me... These are all possible explanations for an often-asked question about my painting Marketplace: A Self-Portrait .The explanations, however, are never as interesting or important as the fact that these kinds of questions are asked, an affirmation of my belief in the story-telling power of figure and gesture in context.
This series is inspired by my incredibly moving homeland trip to Vietnam a few years ago and driven by questions about memory and family history, especially as they are told through the women in my family. The journey back to Vietnam extends beyond the actual trip. The exploration started with an interest to see a land where I was born but did not remember. Fueled by the experiences I had there, I have continued to explore through visual narratives my history as a political refugee, and as a woman of Chinese and Vietnamese cultural heritage living in America. The narrative elements in this series are driven by figure, gesture and locale. Gestures and small details tell stories about every day life in the marketplaces, rural villages, and coastal towns of southern Vietnam. I was interested in the ordinary, in the gesture of a cyclo driver taking a smoke break in the middle of the day |
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amidst the hustle and bustle, humidity, noise, dust, and crowdedness of Ho Chi Minh City, in a cyclist amidst a crowd of commuters, wiping sweat from her brow, in girls walking through town together, holding hands.
However, this body of work is not merely about documentation of quotidian life in southeast Asia, nor is it driven by anthropological fascination with the exotic. These works are informed by my experience as a Viet kieu (the term Vietnamese use for overseas Vietnamese): they draw from both a fresh perspective and a deeply personal, familiar one, for accompanying the freshness of being in a marketplace and its immediate sensory impressions, is memory, visually elusive, unclear, and fragile. I worked mainly from pictures and sketches I took during my trip as well as stories and insights I kept in a journal. I was especially interested in the easily-overlooked details from pictures, in the subjects hiding in the backgrounds or shadows or lost in a visual jumble. These pieces were in part an exercise in bringing some clarity and attention to subjects who would otherwise be lost.
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