Please Have a Seat / Ngồi Xuống

Through found objects and familial artifacts, my current work focuses on constructing a family dining room to signify how family meals establish cultural traditions that can extend from generation to generation. Family dinners are key to building culture because each member can connect, communicate, and share their unique backgrounds. I better understood fragments of my family’s experiences in Vietnam as well as their difficulties adapting to America thanks to their stories. To construct my dining space, I transferred personal artifacts from my home to the new installation space. Then, I replicated my mother’s cooking through appropriating found objects. Using text, the “noodles” and “ice cubes” became an important conversational narrative that provided notions of identity, culture, and memory. Unlike my mother’s method of cooking, preparing my own “fake” meals provided a unique perspective of the preparation process and a familiar sense of childhood nostalgia. By presenting personal recorded conversations with my family along with historical photographs I make the audience feel as if though they are a part of the work, welcoming them into the space. Because I have not fully experienced Vietnam, I project the same feeling of cultural diaspora with the audience by simulating a unique conversation and dining tradition.https://scholarship.rollins.edu/studioart_all/1022/thumbnail.jp