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In life, there are ironic cases where people who love each other enduringly fail to communicate verbally no matter how much they try, due to various unnamed reasons. 

 

For me, one of those people is my father, who has had a great influence on my life. My father is a ceramic sculptor, born in the pottery village Giang Cao (Bát Tràng). Despite us both practising art, my father never wanted me to pursue this path. Partly because he was born and struggled from poverty, he always stressed that "this profession is especially hard for women" and “poets shall not take earning daily bread lightly”(*); partly because of the generation gap that lead to numeral conflicts and disagreements between us. Over time, I realized that  my father's pressures and our conflicts stem from his unrelenting love and concern for me. Although we rarely exchange words, there have always been silent conversations between us and unconscious reflections between our works, thoughts and practices.

 

I chose the material of rice paper that is sturdy, brittle and fragile when dry, yet flexible and malleable when in contact with water, just like clay - the material that has great significance to both of us. I use rice paper rolls as tracing paper, to unearth our relationship through fragments of family history via written letters and photographs, my father’s sketches and manuscripts, as well as his collected documents on ceramic antiques which used to be one of his early bread-winning ways to raise me. Additionally, these featured some details from Henri Oger's drawings of life in Vietnam. Because at the beginning of his career, my father used to trace these historical drawings then reconstructed and signed under my name. This process of unearthing our relationship also leads me to unlearn about my connection with family, homeland and with life - a life making art and the art of living where I was born. 

 

(*) This was a rough translation of a line from Xuân Diệu's poem that my father always quoted during my adolescent years.