I am a by-product of the wave of contemporary diasporas, and although I did not experience exile firsthand, I still am defined by the effects of location and relocation, adaptation and resettlement. I have inherited the traumas of war, colonialism, and natural disasters through a collective memory. I came into existence positioned in an ongoing narrative of the Vietnam War, an event that ended before my times. I am the distillation of a cultural sadness, a haunting history, and I recognize it in the way I’ve engaged with the world.
This feeling of displacement is difficult to explain. There’s this comprehensible, measurable distance between where I am and Vietnam, but there is also a strange and intangible distance that takes on many ambiguous forms. This indecipherable distance has formed into an ongoing enigmatic desire, which informs the use of the imaginary and fantasy in my works as temporary solutions to issues of self-hood and nameless longings.
Through drawing methods, I create realms of ambiguous alternate spaces where the self and the other, here and there can be consolidated by forming a visual context for my distant desires. Drawing creates the ability to give a tangible, physical presence to invisible, social obstructions that detain me and many others from ‘returning’. The drawings become evidence of my corporeal engagement with place; a sensory documentation of translations/transferences of my becoming/being. I am to be found over there, over here, and in between, (re)adapted, (re)located, and (re)settled.
Andy Van Dinh
