As my work shares insight into personal life experiences, it also communicates the messages that have found their rhythms in the human experience to remind us that there is nothing new under the sun.

As a second-generation Vietnamese American, art has become an invaluable tool that has granted me the opportunity to live the refugee, immigrant experiences vicariously through the ones who arrived before me, allowing me to interpret these stories through my own ears, eyes and hands. With deep respect, I bind these inherited stories into our witnessing of history’s alliteration, of persecution and injustice, of mass exodus and the tribulations that we continue to face upon arrival, and of the anticipated opportunities that indeed await us on new horizons as we set our gaze upon home and promise.

My current work serves as an aperture into which I examine the stories of an enduring People who have been targeted worldwide, amidst an immigration and refugee crisis that has been a consistent humanitarian struggle throughout all of human history. Drawn from intimate experiences of heartache and triumph, of struggle and perseverance, and of loss and provision, my art practice strives to find comfort by searching for, and then sharing the discovered faith, fulfillment, and freedom that have fostered me/Us during these anguishing times.

Through the creative process, I learn to adopt the joys and the hardships that persist in these meandering liminal spaces wherein we usher what we’ve witnessed into history, as living history. I transcribe these true tales of triumph, that serve as reminders that out of tragedy is ever born the blessings that we might have never been able to predict could or would come.

I pay respect to the details in the work as I hope to do in life as I document history, present, and hope for the future by utilizing a breath of natural, traditional, and inherited media that hold histories of their own. They, too, have stories to tell me. I seek the patience that is consistently offered through inspirational stories of human perseverance, the labor in my meticulous art practice, and the comfort in the beauty that is discovered throughout. Longing to bring the unknown into the known, the often-overlooked details in my work call to attention my efforts to be more sensitive toward the things that go unnoticed, the things that we take for granted, and the quiet moments when the profundity of Life can speak so clearly to us. These works also speak on the healing that occurs on a human and universal level, while we wade through the circumstances of life, striving to find meaning and look to the passage of time and forgiveness to mend things fractured.