Dead Culture in Liminal Spaces 

My work explores personal identity tied with the concept of genetic memory and dreams. Through these foundational concepts, I investigate themes of irony, confinement, desolation, and lament using a multidisciplinary approach to art making. 

Culture as art is often only presented or celebrated through a tragic and historical and lens. While racial justice and cultural history are foundational for me, I aim to examine the more subjective questions of cultural and racial identity in the present and future. Too often we present and commodify our historical tragedies for validation and understanding – it is much more difficult to unpack where the traumas have led us, whom these stories really belong to, and if these stories can lead us to the future. 

My practice actively reinterprets artifacts, architecture, religious iconography, and cultural symbols intrinsically tied to my cross-cultural experience as a Laotian and Vietnamese American. By emphasizing the usage of new media, I work to break new ground into cultural expression beyond using art solely as a tool for cultural preservation. My Laotian and Vietnamese background serves as a vehicle to unravel an identity founded in a refugee experience. 

White space is predominant and references both funerary rites and a blank slate. Beyond its formal aesthetic qualities, it is also a recurring force in my dreams, giving an oppressive sense of purgatory and isolation. I distance my work from their historical influences and present them as motifs of generational trauma and potentiality by using non-traditional media such as 3D modeling, video, and animation. While I feel tied to the rich cultural heritage that I pull influence from, I often ask how sincere my own sense of identity, peace, and anxieties are tied to them as time moves ever onward. Through this work, I explore the questions of “what is left, what is it now, and what can it (or I) become?” As time erodes these forms or “memories” of my own cultural self, I investigate a bleak past, an uncertain future, and the universal search for self-identity and belonging.