She and I never belonged — the artist statement

I’m drawn to opposites. I come from a place where tenderness and control coexist. Here in Vietnam, the collective memory still clings to a lost petit-bourgeois Saigon—its songs, its poems, its soft glamour—yet that world was taken away. The romance, however, lingers in everything. You are asked to orient yourself toward collective ideals, while at the same time being allowed, even encouraged, to participate in a market economy. That contradiction is not just political; it is intimate. The friction between what is felt and what is allowed sits at the core of my work.

For me, that tension is deeply sensual. Western artists may take certain kinds of erotic charge for granted, but here, that kind of sensuality often feels like it “doesn’t belong,” like it is slightly out of place. I use visual language to stage this not-belonging: organic lines pushing against hyper-synthetic colour, asymmetrical compositions wrapped around figures built on more classical principles, contemporary materials carrying themes drawn from pre-1975 poetry and music. Bodies, objects, and small urban corners become sites where these mismatches are finally allowed to surface.

I am not interested in a single “pure” medium. I move between digital illustration, prints and small functional objects with an openly commercial purpose. That, too, is another layer of tension: the work is for me, but it also has to survive as something that can be sold, touched, hung in cramped apartments and ordinary rooms. The sensual image enters domestic, practical space and quietly shifts its temperature.

What matters to me is the gaze that forms when these opposites meet—the moment you feel both comfort and unease, attraction and distance. My work is a way of holding that gaze a little longer: long enough to notice how much of our inner life is negotiating with the structures around it, and how, even under pressure, a private, sensual imagination still finds ways to survive. Ultimately, this artist statement reveals my core: I never belonged here. And it is from the solitary perspective of the outsider that I find my truth and the most authentic expression of my art.