Profiles

The story changes the longer you look, and even when you turn away from the canvas, a haunting afterimage lingers—like a memory of a bittersweet encounter, or of the first book that made you cry.

"With every painting, I struggle. I struggle with the composition and color, like how I struggle with life.  As I am working on it, through it, I heal."

Our identities as queer and trans Vietnamese people call that we fight for liberation. From our ancestors the Trưng sisters who led the first resistance movement against occupying Chinese in Vietnam to our parents who managed to create homes, build businesses, and send their kids to college after leaving their homeland with nothing.

"I feel my passions are forever pulling me in different directions, each tying and severing themselves from me of their own free will. Writing fiction is the only way I’ve been able to track these flippant passions and preserve them in some way."

Underbellies are beautiful. I am drawn to shadows and reflections because they decenter the dominant subject, the main message, and instead reveal the margins of a substance.

Wherever new wave was playing was a safe space. They knew they could congregate with other young Vietnamese, and momentarily escape pressures from home, their past trauma, and just be whatever version of themselves they wanted to be.