+1 museum by any other name | Thy Truong x Hoang Nam Viet

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Memory is such a funny thing: supposedly we patch the experience together each time we remember the thing, reconstructing it over and over again. It's like a work in progress that is never finished — and then you talk to your friends, trying to recall the details, and a collaboration emerges...

In this case, I'm trying to recall how a certain question popped into my head: the question of whether butterflies ever return home. The question arose while discussing this installation by Thy and Viet for MoTplus/a.Farm in the broken elevator, and the conversation somehow drifted from the topic of gates to the topic of butterflies and angel wings. We were chatting about the liminal space at the threshold of the home, and Thy's earliest memories of Saigon, peeking into the alleyways through the gaps in the gates — her inspiration for this new work where she cast decorative gate details in resin, molded from the gates of her extended family's homes and other significant buildings that she's been dwelling in during her a.Farm Residency here in Saigon...

And there was a particular motif, one which casts an inverted shadow of light resembling butterfly wings, which Viet wanted to paint, and somehow the conversation shifted to Thy's interest in butterflies and angels. I pointed out that angels were a long running theme in Viet's painting practice, and we looked at his sketches of various angels, some of them vengeful, others more like martyrs.

I can't recall how the question arose, of whether butterflies ever return home, and while I promptly looked up the answer, the technical details are less important than the poetic implications of the question itself. You don't need to be a lepidopterist to know that a butterfly can never return to the cocoon and revert back into a caterpillar... just as a viet kieu, once educated abroad, can never turn back into a "real" Vietnamese (a matter you could speak to no doubt).

I feel we are all going out on a limb here with this collaboration, flinging ourselves into the unknown, trust falling into one another's arms, getting out of our comfort zones of controlled creativity, and taking a chance with this experiment. But I doubt the caterpillar worries about undergoing metamorphosis, even in the face of utter dissolution, death and rebirth. So let us take the leap.

Oh wait, I just remembered! The butterfly question arose from another question I keep asking recently — it was central to the show I curated in my apartment last year, and it became the title of an exhibition review I published recently, which I titled "Who Among Us Can Ever Return Home?" As usual in such contexts, the question is rhetorical, but hopefully, thought provoking. Maybe for once I don't need to wrap the concept up in a tight little bow — maybe for once, I can just leave the gate open...

All Best,

Dave Willis

Ps. I just noticed that your Gmail profile pic has a butterfly in it! What a beautiful synchronicity...

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Every time I leave home, I come back trying to re-learn everything again, and I've had so many homes! A butterfly travels everywhere; it remembers a piece of each environment and carries traces of it into the next place. In the age of globalization, increasingly people are reconstructing their worlds around them, constantly adjusting to cultures that are not entirely their roots.

I wonder if identity and memory will remain such dominant topics in art when mixed heritage, migration, and cultural hybridity become the norm rather than the exception. Of course, it remains important to recognize the qualities we associate with a "real" Vietnamese person, but as you point out, there is no returning to the original self.

At the same time, I don't think this applies only to Viet Kieus. Transformation happens to everyone. People are constantly evolving through different phases of their lives, becoming versions of themselves they could not have predicted, regardless of where they live. So in a way, maybe even the locals in Vietnam are becoming Viet Kieus.

"Where are you from?" used to be one of the most common ways to get to know someone. Today, the question is no less relevant, but the boundaries of the answer are much harder to draw. Is it where you were born? Where you were raised? Where you discovered yourself? Or perhaps where your memories reside?

As for who among us can return home, I think the question remains open. Home welcomes anyone willing to relearn it and accept the changes it has undergone. Home is always changing too; it is not only the butterfly that transforms.

The butterfly effect suggests that small movements can produce consequences far beyond what we can predict. If being Viet Kieu is a vehicle for becoming a butterfly in this case, then perhaps the point is not whether the butterfly returns home, but how many homes it creates simply by passing through.

Hugs,

Karlie