In Draw the Curtain // Kéo cái Màn, La explores the tension between visibility and concealment, playing with a lack of directional clarity. Hand-sewn squares come together to form a quilt-like structure, whose final shape gives the installation its name. She leaves traces of chalk markings on one side and tangled gold thread on the other, inviting viewers to witness both the façade and the intimate workings beneath.

Developed between 2019 and 2020 during her four-month residency at A.Farm in Saigon, Vietnam, this work examines themes of identity, language, intergenerational silence, and labor. Often referred to as Việt Kiều (Overseas Vietnamese), she navigates the fluid, in-between space of two cultures.

Installation 

Front: rice, chalk, acrylic, glitter, gold thread, dead stock military fabric, 9' x 16'  

Back: single-channel video: 60:00 minutes, sound 

Her material selections are extracted from fragmented ancestral anecdotes regarding her parents' plight from Vietnam to Canada, acquired on her journey throughout Vietnam’s southern region. The foundation for the central work: dead stock military fabric, an allegorical representation of the mass displacement of Vietnamese civilians from their homeland post ‘75, speaks to the divisiveness and legacy of war beyond its territory. The other central material: rice, a childhood meal requisite evoking nostalgia, and functioning both as physical sustenance and as a physical stand in for emotional discourse. 

Individual grains of rice are transformed into gold-like beads. Through the labour-intensive act of hand-embroidering each grain using gold thread she works to process and reconcile the disparate lived experience between herself and her family, by spending time threading abstracted Vietnamese tonal marks of her making.

The resulting celebratory emblem, made from a privileged narratorial position of having time to meditate on these notions, is a simultaneous attempt to both pay homage and question the perception of capital value and socioeconomic positioning, in relation to language ability and geographic location. 

Details

Studio 

A.Farm, 2019 

Using Format