Statement

I make pictures from Biên Hòa stoneware, the ceramic tradition of southern Vietnam, here in Biên Hòa itself — where the kilns are thinning out and moving on under new zoning plans.

I mix the glazes myself, learning from the people still bound to the trade. Potters at the local kilns prepare the clay, roll it into thin slabs about the size of a hand, and leave them to dry. When the clay is dry enough, I hire artisans to brush my glazes onto each slab, and the slabs are fired. What comes out of the kiln is the raw material for my pictures: thin tiles of stoneware in the glazes I have chosen. As I build a picture I break them, or cut them with nippers, into smaller pieces with the edges I want, and set each piece in its place. Among the new fragments go old ones I have picked up over the years, and there are fewer of those each year.

The glaze that made the name of Biên Hòa ceramics — the speckled copper green the French called vert de Bien Hoa — now survives mostly on old objects. The knowledge and the conditions that produced it, from recipe and materials to the kiln and the handling of the fire, have largely broken. Researchers and dedicated artisans are working to revive it, but no result has yet been published and fully verified. I cannot make that glaze. The colour that most defines the place I come from is absent from my own pictures, and I do not conceal that.

For nearly twenty years I have been assembling images out of fragments — of ceramic, and of memory. After all those years the thing I want to know is still the same one: whether something pieced back together out of fragments can come to hold a value of its own.

The work shown here runs along two threads. What Lies Ahead is two portraits of children, set side by side, looking toward the days ahead of them. Cultural Portraits is a group of portraits of people who held an art form and its culture for a community, and carried it to the public. One thread is what has not yet taken shape; the other is what has already passed.

The material carries the same question as the subject. I came too late, and without the means or the standing, to inherit the tradition whole. Old fragments grow fewer every year, so most of the pieces in each face are ones whose glaze I mixed myself and had fired, batch after batch, over many years. That reconstruction is both an invention in the material and a divergence: it is no longer the original, and it will never be quite the thing it rebuilds. I do not try to hide that divergence.

No part of these surfaces is entirely continuous. The joins and the broken edges are there at every centimetre, and nothing is done to hide them. That is the condition I want to record, not simply a formal effect I have chosen.

I do not see this as a loss to lament. It is a law, and the natural condition of whatever survives its passage through time. What survives need not be intact; it can go on existing, changing, carrying meanings other than the ones it began with, even when the dust of years has settled over its original shape. I am not restoring anything. I am recording what a surface looks like when it is held together by its own breaks.