Unfortunately, in real life, I always have to learn how to adjust myself in the frame of Vietnamese custom, which is controlled every aspect of our modern society. It associates with times, places, and living spaces of each one of us, as a burden of heritage that one can not escape, or a price to paid to exchange for being accepted. It is also changing, but too slow to keep up with the technology-infussed modern life.

With a closer look at this issue, I realize that, the cause could be the difference in the way of acknowledge the reality. Or, in another words, majority’s reality is being dominated and limited by a set of default ideas that implicit in traditional custom. From my observation, such problems usually had its root from within, one’s ideal mind. It defined how the world should be, so that the reality would be shaped following its projection. I’d like to link it up with Plato’s ideal form, a core idea I used to develop my body of works since 2008, including “Falling Cloud” video installation, “Ideal Fall” photography series, and 5 duos of new painting and sculpture titled “The Weirdness of an Ideal Mind”.

Being trained as a painter, at that time, I was trying to experiment contemporary arts other than painting. My works often started with the concerns about the contextualizing of expression, interpretation, association and the implicit relations between them… It deeply rooted from the visible/invisible conflicts, that take a dominated role in our culture and society. I like to speak my mind through metaphor, so it is in my work. It was a transition period for me, continuing to deal with the black hole situation (the lack of almost everything: information, knowledge, skills…) as well as the dramatic changes in Vietnam after the ‘Opening’.

Having interested in consciousness, along with my own self exploration, I found out that it was not only the process of building awareness about one’s own but also the projections, that create one's relations to the outside world. It is an adventure of life that can be started from many vantage points and go through many directions or a process of learning about oneself (or thing) in between theirs complicated intertwining relations to environment. “Tree, a view from both sides, Ho Chi Minh city, 2003” was my first work addressed that interest of mine. Studying “relations” has brought me to the realms of duality and paradox, which were always shifted and relative according to the angles of view. It also broaden my reading list to philosophy, Buddhism, phenomenology and quantum physics. The most interesting part is, for me, to find the links/relations that might existed between things, such as, karma and parallel universes, time and space, history and present, the inner and outside worlds of a human being…

In my practice, I’d like to imagine the aesthetic as a liquid and the art-making process as a mold, so that the aesthetic, to a certain degree, could be molded by the artist naturally, flexibly even without any awareness by the artist. Jan Bas Ader, Martin Kippenberger and Janine Antoni could be cited as my main source of influence.