Necrodialogue
Oil on Canvas, 3x4 ft / 1x2 ft (diptych), 2025
Everything forever in its place
Oil on canvas, 2 x 1 ft / 2 x 4 ft / 2 x 1 ft (triptych), 2025
On the visual and specifically pictorial representation of atrocities, both works examine the utility/power or lack thereof in image making in regards to genocide and colonial violence, US deportees, the super prison CECOT, my personal relationship with malformed fetus caused by the agent orange campaige waged during the US invasion of Vietnam, and pictures of frostbitten children's feet in Gaza - represented as ghostly vestiges. Both works reflect US atrocities and migrant (non) belonging, mediated by the liminal space where refugees and victims of genocides go, the ocean, or camps. Growing up in Vietnam, I am deeply cognizant of the non-space that we non-whites live in, as I witness living victims of Agent Orange, burn victims of Napalm crawl the streets of Saigon. Representation of atrocities simulates a reality, a reality that is, to those who reside within the imperial core, merely a spectacle. The sadistic violence enacted upon the migrant population, the Palestinian population, and the Global South overall by the U.S military and its extensions is not tangible to the empire’s domestic citizens, which makes the spectators. American citizens sit at the heart of empires, haunted by spectacles of catastrophes from decades past, the martyrs become a totemic symbol, but intangible. “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.” -Guy Debord, Society of The Spectacle
