I am a Vietnamese American multidisciplinary artist. Geographic, social and cultural confluences shape my practice. I explore the porous boundary between personal and collective history by deconstructing materials and images to (re)construct personal experiences and narratives within the greater cultural context of which I am a part.
Drawing from the shuffling, cross-cultural entanglements and everyday manifestations of identity, memory, and displacement, I work through diverse media including painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. My story as a refugee and immigrant is often a starting point, and then I expand from there. Over time, I’ve tried to learn how to hold the specificity of my experience in tension with a desire to connect with the more universal dimensions of human experience.
In my work, I weave intimate stories using photographs, text, video, sound, imagery with Southeast Asian and Western symbols, and use cultural code-shifting as a means of expression. Through my investigations into material culture, I frequently utilize everyday objects that not only hold familial meaning but have global associations with class, race, gender and power.
Focusing on the experiences and the erasure of Asian American narratives, my work seeks to redress this oversight, making visible the intersecting challenges, hazards and triumphs of the Vietnamese diaspora that collective memory has obscured. Through my work, I hope to construct spaces within which the ever-changing, always unfinished meaning of selfhood can be explored, subverted and reimagined.
All images are copyrighted © by MyLoan Dinh. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist is obtained.