Hoa Binh (Peace)

This painting depicts the old bomb craters that remain scattered across the rice fields of my homeland.

During the Vietnam War, my mother's family lost most of its members in a bombing. Shrapnel from the bombs wounded her arms and legs.

When peace returned, her physical wounds healed, but the psychological wounds stayed with her for the rest of her life.

I painted "Hoa Binh" not to depict a perfect, complete peace, but to depict the persistence of memory. What remains after the war is not emptiness, but a landscape that continues to remember.

The Vietnamese text inscribed on the painting is a lyric I deeply love: “Trời hoà bình có xanh như ngày xưa chúng ta thường ngắm nhìn” — "Is the sky in peacetime as blue as it was when we used to gaze at it together?"