ABOUT → THE JOURNEY | THE PALETTE | THE PRACTICE | THE WORK | THE WHY
I was born in Vietnam. I grew up with its warmth, its abundance, its particular way of holding beauty without announcing it. Summers dense with jasmine and magnolia – heady, enveloping scents that arrived at night through open windows. The sound of monsoon rain so full it became its own silence, a cocoon that closed the world out and let me breathe. Bougainvilleas blazing on the terrace of my childhood home, their petals falling and floating in the warm air, and me, small, collecting them from the ground. The sea – warm, unhurried, blue from the first light – that I entered at five in the morning and left only when the day demanded it. A country where nature is not decoration. Where it is the condition of everything.
And in that nature, one colour returned again and again: the deep indigo of tranh thuy mac ink wash painting, of mishima inlaid into the ceramic clay of the tea sets every Vietnamese family has used for generations, of the sea seen from a distance on a clear morning. That indigo – ancient, dense, the colour of ink ground slowly into water – became the first of my two blues. I named it Ancient Ink. I wear it on my body every day. It carries everything I come from: the brushstroke, the ceramic glaze, the tradition of making something meaningful out of very little.
For a long time, I let myself be carried by Western life without asking too many questions. But the older I grow, the more my origins resurface. In memories of streets and dust, of áo bà ba and nón lá, of my mother’s kitchen and the herbs of the Mekong delta. I return to Vietnam more and more often now. Not as a tourist. As someone recovering a source.
And then there is the North. I discovered it gradually, and kept returning, on foot, for days at a time. Lapland. Iceland. Norway. Sweden. Finland. Vast white landscapes where cold soothes and silence is not absence but presence. Where light in winter is something else entirely: soft, lateral, almost hesitant, the way it filters through morning mist over a frozen lake, or diffuses across a snowfield until the horizon disappears. That particular blue-grey, the colour of the sky before it decides what it is, of ice seen through fog, of a snowstorm arriving from a distance, became my second blue. I named it Mist. It carries the cold, the quiet, the enormous peaceful emptiness of those landscapes that taught me, more than anything else, how to breathe.
Art brought me back to myself after each burnout. But it was nature – the monsoon rain of my childhood, the frozen lakes of Lapland – that first showed me what stillness actually felt like in a body. The two are inseparable in my work. You cannot understand the palette without understanding the places.
Ancient Ink carries the first world. Mist carries the second. The white of the paper holds them both: the rice, and the snow.
Two worlds that look nothing alike, and share everything that matters. The same humility before nature. The same restraint. The same belief that beauty does not need to shout.
This is not minimalism by taste. It is minimalism by belonging.
ABOUT → THE JOURNEY | THE PALETTE | THE PRACTICE | THE WORK | THE WHY