2025
Aluminium, mesh fabric, silicone, foam
Installation view Savvy Contemporary, 2025
These textile motifs—florals, polka dots, camouflage, and checks—resonate with what theorists Arjun Appadurai describes as emergent visual languages shaped by global circulation, supply chains, and shifting cultural economies. Often dismissed as generic, these patterns embody a vernacular globalism : endlessly reproduced across borders, yet marked by class, gender, and postcolonial legacies. In Vietnam, they operate as everyday uniforms. These garments are once hyper-visible and socially invisible signaling care, labor, protection, and the intimacy of daily life.
The sculptures are framed in narrow aluminum structures that echo the proportions and facades of Vietnam’s “tube houses”—multi-story, compressed dwellings commonly built with remittance funds. Their stacked verticality, tiled surfaces, and ornamental façades reflect not only economic ambition but also the architectural in-betweenness of transnational life: a hybrid aesthetic of belonging as well as partial return.
The digital printed mesh fabric is stretched tightly or hangs loosely within these rigid and narrow frames, sometimes sagging beyond the edges. These gestures evoke both the soft opacity of curtains and the constraint spaces of the “tube” architecture, signaling the tension between containment and leak, between structural rigidity and the bodily memory embedded in cloth. The works recall windows as a threshold between inside and outside, between the visible and the
concealed.
Photos: Marvin Systermans