It took me so long to finally see the city that I grew up and live in, Hanoi. At her most chaotic, she would appear in front of all of us - veiled in a layer of smoke and dust, yet saturated and almost vibrating in colorful patterns and textiles, surrounded by a mirage of rows of steel and concrete. She sings the song of a thousand motors and crying children. But where is she? 

Through "Mother Dearest", reflecting on womanhood through social experiences, I look outward to survey the many performances of a woman and the small wars against it in a developing techno culture that is so inherently Confucianist. The work focuses on the archive images to straddle with the form of a contemporary woman, with the idea that the battle of domesticity and the specter of the past bait the woman to become an actor of social reproduction in the context of Vietnamese economy and politics.

“Mother Dearest” uses the maternal figure as a gulf between lived experience and delineation. In this, the performance of femininity is carried out through the dramatization of family life - the socialization with others, gender roles, sexual performance and child care. Through that, the image internalizes its roles, much like a woman, as an actor of social reproduction in contemporary society. It hypothesizes the future of the woman figure through the manifestation of past and present images - who cares for the Vietnamese woman?

The figure acts as a presumed origin to then corrupt and/or build it up through theatrical props and stages. In these, the system of building up layers of the photograph, the wallpapers, furniture, outfit and the protagonist the series survey how the female self is articulated. Expanding my investigative framework into the domestic and its secrecy, to elaborate and mythify it via carefully staged photographs, fueled with dreamy, spiritualistic elements and usage for commonplace objects to form an image that brings forth everything at once: politics, aesthetics, ethics, histories. 

Working in a theatrical staging and acting manner, I keep reflecting back on this notion of lying and living -  During the Vietnamese refugee crisis (boat people) in the 70s, as the southern Vietnamese people found themselves in a new land, struggling to make a living for themselves yet send pictures back home showing beautiful sceneries or themselves happy, is this being or make belief? In a postmodern mediascape, where memories are intertwined and “prosthetisticized”, what is the new identity of the Vietnamese woman? Fractured yet claustrophobic in its nature, their outer beings performed the assimilation of western ideologies, but their inner self stumbles with cultural remarks and traditions, is that being or acting? When seeing how one's inner and outer can merge in unruly ways, should this performance and our duties of bearing traditions are not only indistinguishable but key informants for one another?  The work attempts to trace the veneer of a person, through myself as the direct product of the environment and politics that made my mother.

While the city is growing at a comical rate, there exist refugiums of familiar memories - collages of different groups of people occupying a corrupted surface. People seen in these found images are separated away from one another, either by failing systems in power, or have passed, amidst the chaos. Using collage to generate a new form of cohabitating between individuals who were pushed away from each others, they serve as a network of community of a form of freedom fit for the present day: not as unconstrained, wild abandon but as the freedom to generate own lived reality outside failing systems of power. It is like a paradox is at play. The collages express this need to stop denying one thing, in order to absolve another, and how this can open the possibility for more relations within an image surface to accumulate. 

-soon-