Original title (provided by artist): Uniform - Wallpaper.

Other titles:

Uniform - Wallpaper (in "Towards Realist Socialization" Exhibition, Galerie Quynh, 2020).

Uniform (in "Vietnam in Transition, 1976–Present" Exhibition, Wende Museum, 2023).

Statement

I adorned these 40 paintings with a sort of uniform made from similar motifs, but you won’t be able to find any two works that are exactly the same. The works evoke a nostalgia for things, events, and images that I have experienced, but are now someone else’s present and will be another’s future. I began working on the series but did not bother setting out a clear direction; from all angles the paintings looked the same. Only when I printed the silhouettes of a schoolboy (what is he saluting?) did I need to choose a certain direction. The repeated images, overlapping and effacing one another, are akin to the confusions and gaps in memory. Motifs of mesh wires, flowers, burning fires, the shadows of monuments: no matter what they are, they have all become decorative details – an embellished outer layer. Who knows if mesh wires are really stronger than flowers, or the shadows of monuments larger than a schoolboy? I worked on this series for over six months. I was bored of every day being the same, repetitive as machinery. Despite the boredom though, just like daily life I had to do it. Wallpaper inside a home, lying there, laying still. Only to be replaced once demoded.