Current Research

I am working to widen the range of the material: ceramic from sources beyond Biên Hòa, sedimentary material, and fragments I pick up rather than make. Each fragment carries a story of its own. I treat them as units of memory, not simply as units of colour. It is a deliberate choice in the way I work now.

Alongside the ceramic pictures I also paint in oil. As a matter of course, and by chance, at some point ceramic entered the oil painting — or oil entered the surface of a ceramic picture; I am no longer sure which. In a few works the ceramic then appears where the surface needs a break in the material: Mother and Sea (2018), and Old Soul, Old Streets (2024), from the Cultural Portraits series. In these works material and idea crowd the starting point together. Which surface has to be present, which surfaces should sit next to each other, and what their contrast will do for the work — all of it has to be weighed from the outset.

Looking back at the works in sequence, I can see the glaze palette narrowing. In The Eyes of Tà Lài and Hoofbeats of a Southern Sky the colour still ran wide — many hues, many tones, strong contrast between light and dark. Later it drew in toward the tones of earth: browns, ochres, greys, as in Bán Dùi: Portrait of Bùi Giáng and Dawn of the Stage. I did not set out to make that shift. It is a direction that formed in the working, not a route I laid out in advance.

This page records what I am doing now, processes still unfinished. Nothing here is complete, and some of what is here today may be left behind further along.

The studio in Biên Hòa is being rebuilt and will not be ready for some months. In the meantime I am working in a temporary space.