Dead Culture & Future Relics

Working from a fundamentally cynical Futurist framework, I engage with the concept of genetic memory, erasure, and control. Through these concepts, I convey themes of irony, confinement, desolation, and disillusion, employing a transdisciplinary approach that spans sculpture, video, and new media.

This continuing body of work actively reinterprets artifacts, architecture, religious iconography, and cultural symbols intrinsically tied to my cross-cultural experience as a Laotian and Vietnamese American. By leveraging new media and emerging technologies, I explore cultural expression beyond using art as a tool for cultural preservation, celebration, and social commodity. In this way, my work becomes a prototypical praxis of iterating the coming future, while actively rejecting the Orientalism that has imprinted upon our expectations of the subject matter.

By leveraging non-traditional media such as 3D modeling, manufacturing processes, and animation, the works distance themselves from their historical influences and are presented as motifs of both generational trauma and potentiality. The underlying industrial materiality implies nihilism, absurdity, a post-colonial outlook, and the coldness of the urbanized landscape. Through this work, I explore the questions of “what is left, what is it now, and what can it (or I) become?” Through scholarly research, iteration, and reiteration, I investigate a bleak past and an uncertain future, expressing a sincere agitation that is rarely allowable in academic and aesthetic discourse.