To My Celestial

To My Celestial is my offering to the afterlife. This multimedia installation reimagines Vietnamese ancestral worship through personal memory and displacement. It proposes how ritual practices can be reformed and redesigned by diasporic experiences. The work takes the form of a speculative altar that reinterprets traditional Vietnamese spirituality through immersive media.

This work asks what happens when rituals migrate and must adapt to new contexts. Though personal, the project speaks to many in the diaspora who live between cultures and feel the weight of distance and belonging, and shows that this is my way of making peace with that tension. I believe traditions don’t have to remain fixed, they continue to grow and evolve within the societies we now become part of.

(2024)

(Mixed-media installation)

Visitors enter an immersive, liminal space between the reality and afterlife, centered around an altar with a green-screen picture frame. The frame is chroma-keyed with fragmented footage from my hometown. As visitors move through the space, their images are captured into the projection, into my imagined celestial world.

Print matters

To My Celestial has been presented in different forms and scales to the public

Project supervised by Florian Cramer
Special thanks to Hanh Nhan (sound design), Omar Ayabarus (technical support), Mr Hai Joss Paper household (Hue city)
Created with Figma, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, OBS Studio
Photoshoot taken at Wdka Photo Studio
Book printed and bound at Wdka Publication Station.

Next