London, UK
July 10 to 19 September, 2026
Ration Market (2022) and Hole Story (2023) are on view at SLQS Gallery as part of the inaugural Whitechapel Backyard Biennial in London.
My gratitude to K.V. Duong and Hoa Dung Clerget for organising the ‘No Place Like Home III’, which takes inspiration from diasporic gardens. It is the third edition of their artist-led project thinking about the diasporic home.
When we discussed the theme of the show, my family’s home in Binh Canh district on the rural outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City came top of mind. There, a wild garden proliferates with the uncontrollable growth of the Morning Glory plant (aka rau muong/tong choi/kangkung). The plant thrives because the land is increasingly flooded from climate change, that I interpret as foreshadowing for future of climate displacement.
When I thought of the title of the show, ‘No Place Like Home’, I took it literally to consider how homes may soon disappear if the rising sea encroaches upon Ho Chi Minh City, as projected by the U.N. for 2050.
Ration Market transforms Morning Glory into portable survival rations, which is both a nod to its historical rationing after the Vietnam War and to anticipate climate-induced migration from Southeast Asia in the near future. Through experimentation with K.V., we came up with a novel way to exhibit the sculptures as a sequence of 21 units to suggest a week’s worth of sustenance with three rations per day. The watery condition of the land Is revealed in ‘Hole Story’ which speculates on the purpose of unattended sewer holes that punctuate the land.
The exhibition is installed on walls that were painted by K.V. and Hoa to evoke a mass of people, like a home gathering. To me, the marks also appear like a flood line. There is a productive tension when read together with my work signalling climate migration among anonymous people on the wall.
