August 20, 2024
Migrating from Vietnam to the U.S. at an early age, the overwhelming cultural and physical transitions demanded my intensive observation to comprehend the foreign habitat. Consequently, my practice evolved into a site-responsive process, focusing on our relationships to the surrounding minutia, in connection to the grander environment, while questioning our position within that spectrum. My work becomes an apparatus to dissect and translate the site, and often accumulate the surrounding information into a ‘nesting’ habitat, where I observe, investigate, and draw connections. This obsessive impulse questions the dynamics of ‘home/displacement’, ‘decay/growth’, ‘temporary/permanence’, in pursuit of a deeper understanding of our symbiotic relationships to the complex systems around us.
The few projects that I had intially anticipated would be the focus of the one-week intensive studio time at IEA had quickly grew many branches once I arrived and was swiftly taken by the exciting explorative and generative energy of the program. To get started, silkscreen became the medium I gravitated toward to quickly put images to paper and fabric. These image materials are dissected through laser and hand cutting, and then re-essembled into new intertwining forms. A few things I was working on includes printing on mesh fabrics that are then erected into a wall relief in the forms of survival shelters; interlocking cutout individual printed elements to construct a sculptural collaged bonsai world; a series of lasercutting of complex line works of architectural images on silkscreened papers. Few projects earned their final stages, many were seeded and will be completed soon after the residency to join the finished works, but much more are the invaluable responsive ideas that will be nurtured and wait patiently for their opportunity to emerge in the future.
Duy looking over dye-sublimated prints on polyester.