Tiếng Việt 🇻🇳 / English 🇬🇧
Vở ô ly
(2024 - ongoing)‘‘Việt Nam,’ written in my mother tongue, is made up of two different words: ‘Nam’ and ‘Việt.’ Separated—a chasm between them. Then came the English spelling: ‘Vietnam.’ Never mind the loss of accent marks, anglicisation has taken the liberty of wiping out that gap without even the courtesy of asking what this distance could mean, what caused it, and what secrets are buried within.’
- Bạch Đăng Tùng
By reprinting photographs from our trip to Cambodia and my father’s archival images onto pages from the Vietnamese student exercise book (the titular Vở ô ly)—sourced in Saigon and reminiscent of those I used during high school in Vietnam—I attempt to unlearn the knowledge I once held about my father’s experience of war. That knowledge was shaped by the dominant narratives of the Vietnamese Communist state disseminated through public education, as well as by the American-centric global framing of the American War in Vietnam. The printing technology allows each grid line to fall where it may, echoing the visual logic of the American military coordination system used to deploy troops and initiate attacks across Southeast Asia.
In this series, I collaborate with my father in different ways. First, through the act of making photographs together; then, through my own handwritten transcription of excerpts from his unpublished memoir that he had offered to be shared publicly. Through this back-and-forth act of co-creation, I seek to interrogate inherited understandings of masculinity, war trauma, and loss within my lineage while protecting my father's memories. I aim to explore the interplay between war circumstances and family, remembering and forgetting, the rupture of collective memory, and the effort one makes to fill the gap in-between.
Photographs reprinted on student notebook paper, handwriting transcribing excerpts from my father’s memoir, felt pen, ballpoint pen, color markers.