My photographic practice is rooted in perception as a form of spiritual attention—an act of attunement within the complexity of a given moment. To frame an image is to channel intensity through delicacy, a gesture akin to squeezing dynamite through a flower.
When a photograph transcends the image plane—becoming object, projection, or fleeting convergence—it transforms into an energy field. These works draw from everyday scenes and layered histories, activating the overlooked through acts of witnessing. Each frame becomes a site of resonance, where movement is stilled and the ephemeral enters memory.
In this process, I position myself as an intermediary—mediating between the visible and the invisible, and making latent narratives materially perceptible.
Revelations in Plain Sight
List of Works Left to Right
Ghost Ships and Foreigners
This black and white wartime image—a white man seated beside a Vietnamese woman—spoke to me of the silent undercurrents of prostitution, the transactional intimacies that emerged from conflict, the unspoken spoils of war.
While my studio mate foraged palm fronds, I felt moved to paint them over the photograph. To obscure it. To soften the gaze. To lay, gently, the shape of an angel wing across it—not to erase the pain, but to compassion it. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, “To love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into a very real one… with all its cold iron bars and hot blood.”
This gesture was my staying—with the pain, the memory, and the story etched into the image. Not to look away, but to look through, with tenderness.
The controversial painting Raft of the Medusa by Géricault has long been one of my favorites. The raft carried people we’re often told to look away from—people of color, slaves, so-called savages, cannibals—raw, desperate, and human. That this painting was immortalized during an era known as “Romanticism” feels both ironic and telling. That it now lives in the Louvre museum is a shift in art history.
While attending an artist residency in New Orleans—a city steeped in the history of African American slavery and now home to a significant Vietnamese refugee community—I began researching the boat passages that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese took to escape Communism. I discovered stories often left untold: starvation, rape by pirates, even cannibalism. The horror of Géricault’s raft echoed the horror of these stories.
I wove them together in my work to show that such suffering is not just of the past.
In my studio, I set up a “re-education camp” reenactment. I filmed myself, blindfolded and naked, with a strobe light flashing—thinking of the tortures endured during and after the war. I wanted my own body and this experience, the empathy to be part of the collage. “Caapi Vine”
This photo was taken in the Amazonian jungle near Putamayo. I was at a retreat for yagé. We planted the vine on the lands, so that in two years, others would drink from our hands tending to the land. In reciprocity, we thrive, we sustain. I pushed the colors of this photo in post-production to get closer to how the plant feels. A purple aura is often associated with creativity, intuition, and a deep connection to the spiritual realm. It can also indicate a strong desire for wisdom and knowledge.
The Universal Light…
Fireworks captivate us because they are both terrifying and fleeting—reminding us of the fire that burns within, and the fragile nature of our existence.
During the lockdown, my driveway became an unexpected studio. Beneath my car, a small light shone to keep rats from chewing on wires. That simple glow sparked a series of experiments in long-exposure photography—drawing with light itself, tracing movement and stillness in tandem.
These images are not just photographs; they are abstract creations born from the interplay of light and darkness. As James Turrell reflects, “Light is the medium of light itself.”
In this way, photography becomes less about capturing the world and more about conjuring a new reality—an artwork that emerges from nothing but the dance of illumination and shadow inviting the viewer into a luminous space of wonder and presence.
Salvation Mountain
This is a place where failure transformed into culture, and faith carved itself into a physical mountain. Slab City—where “snowbirds” dwell—draws in nomadic outsiders, off-grid artists, and anti-establishment burners who live by their own rules.
Leonard Knight arrived here with a vision: to build a hot air balloon proclaiming God's message of love for all the world to see. For ten years, he toiled to raise the funds, clinging to this dream. But after countless failed attempts to launch the balloon in the 1980s, he surrendered to a new path—one humbler, more enduring. Day by day, week by week, he salvaged cement, leftover paint, dirt, and debris, unknowingly building a kind of stupa. A monument to his epiphany, as simple and radical as: “God is Love.”
It still stands today, lovingly maintained by volunteers who repaint and rebuild it as it spills, spoils, and cascades down the desert hillside. It’s an iterative artwork, touched by hundreds, visited by thousands—a pilgrimage site of faith and devotion, far from any cathedral.
I photographed the textured walls of the sculpture’s surface and found myself moved by the fierce, unconditional love required to preserve it. The Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—is an elegant abstraction, reminiscent of a giant melting birthday cake. It belongs in the same lineage as other visionary monuments born from obsession and solitude: Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais idéal in Hauterives, southeastern France; Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree; Niki de Saint Phalle’s Il Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany; and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles.
What connects them all is their refusal of the art market, their resistance to commodification. These works exist simply to serve an inner calling—a pure, undisturbed vision.
“Fountain Series”
Fountains are portals. Places to release, to wish, to manifest. The water ripples outward—concentric circles spiraling like threads of the cosmos, each vibration a reminder that all things are connected. These patterns, fleeting and eternal, mirror how every thought and gesture sends echoes into the universe. The image becomes a record of invisible forces made visible, time caught in motion.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
—Carl Sagan
Mary Madeline
Every portrait I take, I feel is a self-portrait. In this performance piece, an artist creates a rosary by biting apples and placing raw strands of uncooked spaghetti on the floor. While chanting in French, the Ho’oponopono prayer, “Je suit désolé. Still the plaît, pardon-moi. Merci, je t’aime.”
The Forgiven World
The phrase “touching the earth” as a spiritual gesture appears in multiple traditions. In Tibetan Buddhism, practitioners perform prostrations—touching head to earth—as acts of humility and devotion. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks poetically about “kissing the earth with your feet” to cultivate mindfulness and connection. Many Indigenous cultures hold similar reverence through land-based ceremonies, an invitation to be present, to bow deeply into the interwoven web of life and honor the sacred ground beneath us.
There was an avalanche at this hidden beach—a sanctuary where whales come to rest in their final journey. A carcass nearby was drifting, a quiet witness to time.
I chose to “touch the earth” here—a sacred act of remembering these ancient beings, who nurture their young with milk, tears, and astral songs, that have called me to this place.
Stripping away all but my breath, I ran as far as my spirit could carry me. And when my forehead met the soil, I felt the pulse of the universe—the forgiveness from the the heart of the world, tender and immense—in touching the earth, we remember: the land holds our stories, our sorrows, and our prayers.
Crumples
Like a shadow that can’t stay tethered to the same wall for too long, I have always been moving. My parents, refugees from Việt Nam, carried boxes of dreams and books across states, countries. I remember a U-Haul truck filled only with my father’s library—a quiet act of resistance, and love.
I’ve lived in many countries, in many rooms inside the same city, and now I dwell in Việt Nam, living week to week, month to month. Here, people still buy homes for life, marry with intention, and stay rooted. But I’ve inherited something different—une âme errante, the wandering soul. Statelessness has become, for me, a kind of freedom.
My art lives in that same liminal space—between photograph and object, collage and readymade. A body in flux, like mine.
Just before leaving Los Angeles for a year of pilgrimage—beginning with an artist residency on a houseboat in Sausalito—I found myself packing, then suddenly, unpacking. The pages I had used to wrap my belongings called out .There was a kind of John Cage-like randomness in the pairings—a strange harmony between editorial gloss and tactile imperfection. The polished fashion spreads were transformed. Their sleekness crinkled into something wabi-sabi and strange, inviting curiosity. Ongoing series, every time I move, I photograph.
“Le réel n’est jamais ce qu’on pourrait croire, mais il est toujours ce qu’on aurait dû croire.” — Jean Baudrillard
The real is never what we think, but always what we should have thought.