STATEMENT OF WORK

My grandparents were lords in Vietnam. My father grew up in a palace surrounded by nurses for his own. I grew up in the suburbs of Paris in a social accommodation, with a view on the local gas station.

The trauma of my family’s violent social downgrading has shaped every single corner of their life and lifestyle, and by extension, mine. Because we were poor, I’ve spent my childhood playing with the most basic tools I could use: a ball pen and A4 sheets of paper. I consider this as the starting point of my artistic practice. Years later, I’ve studied graphic design then fine arts at Beaux-Arts school in Paris, and learnt how to design books in a professional way.

I’ve never felt at home anywhere. My work is located in betweens: East and West, art and design, slowness of books and fastness of images, flatness of photography and sensuality of paint. I try to build a new language out of these dichotomies. Thus, paint becomes canvas while photography is used as pure sprayed ink. By focusing on the materiality of paint, I try to slow down the way we « consume » images, and try to explore what it means to paint in this era of abundant photography and social media. Through distorted selfportraits, the image of my own body becomes a graphic sign that I use almost as paint. My installations are layed out like books, walls are pages, paintings are words and touches of paint are letters.

I mostly work with painting and photography, that I try to reconcile rather than oppose. Traumas from my ancestors I inherited are the roots of my way of working: that of resourcefulness. I use very modest material  that I transform into some kind of precious but savage jewels. I try to see what can be created rather than repaired, to find the beauty and the victories that lay in the so-called defeats.