As a Vietnamese American multidisciplinary artist, I explore the porous boundary between personal and collective histories. Through deconstructing materials and images, I (re)construct narratives within the greater cultural context of which I am a part.
Through my work I'm learning to hold the specificity of my experiences as a refugee and immigrant in tension with the more universal dimensions of human experience. Drawing from geographic and cultural confluences, I reveal through sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, the everyday manifestations of identity, memory, and displacement.
Weaving intimate stories using photographs, text, video, sound, and imagery with Southeast Asian and Western symbols, cultural code-shifting is a form of expression inherent in my work. Through my investigations into material culture, I often repurpose eggshells, fabric, paper, and other humble materials with everyday objects that not only hold familial meaning but have global associations with class, race, gender and power.
Focusing on the experiences and the erasure of Asian American narratives, my work redresses this oversight, making visible the intersecting challenges, hazards and triumphs of the Vietnamese diaspora that collective memory has obscured. Through my work, I hope to construct spaces within which the ever-changing meaning of selfhood can be explored, subverted and reimagined.
All images are copyrighted © by MyLoan Dinh. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist is obtained.