My practice frequently references familiar symbols and actions embedded in everyday life, using found archival footage to collapse historical, familial, and personal memory into the present moment. When my mother was growing up in Vietnam, she worked as a seamstress, mending others’ torn belongings. I extend this gesture into my video work, treating moving images as a textile. The movement of bodies become needles, stitching together fragmented moments across time and space.

In because you are the sun; because you are the thread, the horizon imagery comes from nostalgic and widely watched films and television shows that shaped my family’s upbringing in Vietnam, alongside newer programs—often dubbed in Cantonese or Vietnamese—that they continued to watch after immigrating to Canada. Across generational and linguistic barriers, film served as a shared language. My father, aunt, and uncle learned Cantonese by watching Hong Kong dramas. At home, the television was always on, providing entertainment during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was how my family rested after long, difficult workdays. 

While creating the flipbooks, I retraced my family’s viewing history across decades: from my aunt’s love of tender, angst-filled Taiwanese dramas such as Deep Garden (1987), to Chinese classics like My Fair Princess (1998), to my uncle’s fondness for Western titles like Mission: Impossible (1966) and Tintin (1961). When my mother was a teenager, the Czechoslovakian television series She Fell From Clouds (1978), that follows an alien girl named Maika who falls to Earth and slowly learns how to feel and be human, became a cultural phenomenon in Vietnam. Everyone went to the barber to get Maika’s haircut. I view these films as intersections of collective and personal memory. In watching the shows my family loved, I remembered my own fleeting experiences of awe, heartbreak, and excitement in the past—watching K-dramas during high school lunches or blockbuster films in crowded theaters—and imagined who my mother and other family members were before becoming parents, before their migrations. Retracing their footsteps through film allowed me to imagine the lives they lived before risking everything to create a more comfortable future for their children. 

The horizon serves as the connective tissue across all of these films and shows, linking decades, geographies, and genres. In cinema, horizon shots are commonly used for world-building, to mark the passage of time from day to night, to imply off-screen travel, and most often to announce the ending—the moment when a protagonist rides into the distance as credits roll. Mounted on vending trikes, the flipbooks allow riders to step into the role of protagonist themselves. The gesture echoes my grandfather’s labor, pedaling through the city to sell ice in a time when refrigerators were scarce in Saigon’s hot, humid climate. –Vivian Tran