Battle for Paradise

Cotton thread, cotton fabric and video
6 panels, 15 in x 15 in each
In progress

A hard-of-hearing fan of wildlife documentaries, our grandfather would eat his meals alone at the head of the dinner table with his iPad blaring YouTube videos of predators attacking prey. He neatly translated six wildlife words from English to Vietnamese on the back of one of his prescriptions - likely murmuring the conversions to himself at the same time.

Hyena
Battle
Gorilla
Baboon
Hippopotamus
Paradise

The list’s contents, order, and even the substrate (to use an art term) on which it is made, symbolize a primal persistence in retaining language and extending life. I recall our grandfather poring over newspapers or consulting his Vietnamese-English dictionary with a magnifying glass, his twice daily jogs around my parents’ basement, his proud lifting of bags of soil for the garden, his consumption of copious amounts of garlic and beans, and his frequent blood transfusions.

For this series, we transcribed our grandfather’s shaky handwriting pixel by pixel and stitch by stitch, mispronouncing the words along the way.

linh cẩu
tranh đấu
con khỉ đột
khỉ đầu chó
con hà mã
thiên đường

*Violent animals, hard-earned cash and mortality were themes of interest to my grandfather. His notes about these topics inspire a series of works about language, currency, geography, familial relationships and the immigrant’s split identity.