Statement

I work with Biên Hòa stoneware, a ceramic tradition of southern Vietnam, in a province where that tradition is being built over.

I make my own clay bodies and glazes and fire them in Biên Hòa, following techniques inherited from the old kilns, mixed with a small quantity of salvaged glaze I collect. The tradition's defining colour — the copper green of Biên Hòa — is lost. No one working today can reproduce it. I work inside a tradition that no longer holds its own signature colour, and I do not pretend otherwise. What I make is a reconstruction, not a continuation.

This work began with two children. In 1998 I painted, in oil, a Châu Ro child in Tà Lài, a forest district of Đồng Nai; it was the first work of mine to receive any recognition. I have gone back to that area many times since. In 2023 I made a portrait of another Châu Ro child there — a different face, a generation later — and this time I made it in ceramic. Beside it I placed a portrait of my daughter, imagining herself grown, in uniform, under a calm sky. Two children, two futures: one closing, one open. Until then I had used ceramic because I knew how to. After those two works I understood the material was saying something I had not chosen for it, and I began to work deliberately.

What followed was a group of portraits of Vietnamese cultural figures. Every face belongs to someone who is dead, and to a form that is thinning out: the poem read aloud, the song learned by ear, the cải lương stage, the teaching passed from one person to the next. These works do not ask how to preserve them. They ask what remains available to a culture after the direct line has broken, and whether something assembled afterwards, out of pieces, has any standing of its own.

The material carries the same question as the subject. I arrived too late to inherit the tradition whole, and had to make the missing parts myself. Each face is built from two kinds of fragment — some carrying their own age, some fired last year to supply a tone that no longer exists. I cut and fire each piece to reach a colour the old glaze can no longer give me, then set it against fragments that have their own history.

Nothing in these portraits is continuous. The breaks are visible at every centimetre, and they are not concealed. That is the condition I am describing, not an effect I have chosen.

I do not think this is a loss to be mourned. It is the ordinary condition of anything that survives a city being rebuilt on top of it. I am not restoring anything. I am recording what a surface looks like when it is held together by its breaks.