Chau Nguyen

This is the story of a color. It comes from a short story titled “The Boat in the Distance,” part of Vietnam’s 12th grade literature textbook. The paragraph details a photographer’s encounter with the perfect landscape – a fishing boat approaching the shore at dawn. In its description of this scene, the writer mentions a pink mixed out of white fog and the rising sun. The photographer sees this color within the scene as flawless, just to witness a scene of domestic violence on the boat right afterward.

Through memory and research, my work reimagines this color as a means of translation. The color synthesizes trauma, conflict, history, and memory. Yet it stays bright, luminous, warm, inviting; a complex and effervescent beauty that only makes sense while it still exists, in the moment that it is seen. Bright and Lumious” was made as a statement of resilience not only regarding its textual and historical contexts, but also in response to the collective trauma experienced in 2020.