Mother Dearest 

Our relationship with images is reflexive. An image represents ideology, so ideology is formed through images. In this, dreams become an interpreter for images that represent ideologies. Under this comically rapid growth of the local landscape, its habitants dream of the past as a way of looking forward to the future, images that predict the future is the dream that formed in dreams. Fantastical in a way, yet tangled with reality, and you have to look for it, much like Instagram scrolling. The real and the “fake” are intertwined - theatrical, staged, ‘fake’ (moving) images lay among the candid, social-media-originating ones – images that are “worthwhile” of being seen and “historicalize”. They are proof of dramatic events and suffering in global crisis zones, as well as in local governmental reports. Dreams are the stories we tell ourselves of what could be, who we could become.


In the video portion of this work, it tells of several interwoven dream sequences - a recital of a politician’s dream, a businesswoman’s desire for love, a young man’s story of going back to his hometown. Interweaving subtle references to past geopolitical violence associated with Vietnam, the work offers a complex take on how memory, consciousness, and historical narratives merge. Video is embraced by collages of salvaged architectural remnants - art steel (hoa sắt mỹ thuật), steel door (cửa kéo sắt), mái tôn, quotidian, personal relics such as pantyhose and scarf, and ephemera coalesce as a lyrical reconstitution of an imaginative world with its own narrative and history, yet holds on to its realism.