Lasting Memories

My work explores my relationship with personal memory, shaped by my family’s history of migration from Vietnam to America. By constructing faded images from personal and inherited past and intertwining it with self-autobiographical documentation, I examine the ways in which personal recollection creates the person I am today. Reflecting on how memory functions as both an anchor to my heritage and a means of navigating my place within the American landscape.
The images I make are representations of memories that are meant to fade and disappear, mirroring the way histories are passed down, altered, or lost across generations. Incorporating abstraction and fragmentation, my projects evoke the tension between attempted preservation and the inescapable fate of disappearance, echoing the experience of many immigrant families who hold onto fading traces of their homeland while forging new identities in a foreign space. The images I create offer scenes that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant, bridging the gaps between past and present, here and there.
Given my challenges with vocal communication and building connections, this project serves as a means to express who I am and what I value, reflecting the life I share with my family, the people around me, and the landscapes that have shaped us. The act of making these images invites me to confront grief, as I document moments that, like memories, will one day vanish, leaving only remnants behind. Yet, through this process, I seek to understand how memory shapes identity and human connection, particularly within the complexities of the Vietnamese American experience.
By sharing the past and present, we learn about one another and why certain stories endure. In doing so, my work highlights our shared humanity, transcending race, gender, and ethnicity, while emphasizing recollection’s role in personal and collective identity. Ultimately, my work seeks to preserve fleeting impressions, inviting viewers to reflect on their own memories, what is kept, what is lost, and how these fragments shape who we are.