I have always been an artist.
My kindergarten teacher once wrote on my report card: “Cannot sit still, distracts classmates, talks too much. Has a keen liking to Art.” I had no idea then that that sentence would follow me for the rest of my life.
My family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. I was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1992 under a new moon, and two months later my mother and I flew sixteen hours to Long Beach, California. I grew up in Orange County, surrounded by one of the largest Vietnamese communities outside of Vietnam. I spoke Vietnamese before English and grew up between two cultures: one rooted in family, tradition, and sacrifice; the other in independence and self-expression.
For a long time, I felt like I belonged to neither. I was never Vietnamese enough. Never American enough. Eventually, I stopped trying to choose between the two and began creating my own third culture.
That tension between identity and belonging continues to shape my work.
I have always been fascinated by the natural world, from the tropical forest of SouthEast Asia to the Pacific Northwest, from bananas to banana slugs, from chilies to mushrooms. Nature is strange, beautiful, and powerful. Growing up in Southern California, I often felt surrounded by concrete and artificiality. I longed for something alive, something natural, real. I found it in the redwood forests of Humboldt County, on Wiyot Land.
I began taking art seriously in 2010, when I took my first ceramics class as a high school senior (shout out to Ms Wang!). Sixteen years later, I am still trying to understand myself through clay.
My work is deeply personal, but it is also how I process the world around me. I am interested in the tension between beauty and suffering, grief and joy, humor and pain. There is so much wrong with the world, and somehow there is still so much beauty. I don't know how to reconcile the two, so I make things.
I make work about bodies, sexuality, shame, identity, womanhood, cultural inheritance, grief, absurdity, and the natural world. I make work about the things we are often taught not to talk about.
I have spent much of my life learning to love a body and identity I was taught to criticize. Eventually, I decided that if the world wasn't going to teach me how to love myself, I would have to learn.
My art is where I bury the burden and where I make room for happiness, humor, love, and wonder.
My art tells my story, but it is also an invitation for someone else to see a piece of themselves in it.
No one asks to be born. Yet here we are.
I am still trying to make sense of it all.
Will you join me on this adventure?
