Mother tongue

2023 (ongoing)

Mother tongue is a series of art works that born out of my ever-growing fascination with the musicality and playfulness of Vietnamese language and my recent research on contextualisation.

Vi vu

appears in form of a video – a collection of rhythming compounds, with focus mainly on words that evoke sounds, i.e. Onomatopoeia. Each word is experienced in three ways: spoken by me, seen by the appearance of Vietnamese language on screen and by a series of still frames, some are my personal photos, some are found images in the public domain. These images although sometimes seemingly unrelated to each other are linked by the narrative of the onomatopoeia…

…trong tiếng nhạc thần bay

is a composition with Vietnamese tautogram recited by myself and its automatically Google translated version spoken by the robotic voice of Text-to-Speech function and my piano interpretation of Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite in C minor. This work was born out of my ever-growing fascination with the musicality and playfulness of Vietnamese language. I’m curious to see what is lost and what is found in the translation process – meaning, connotation, expression, musicality …

Lạc

contemplates on the relationship between language and its creator, its physical source – human being. Can we fully feel and understand the language without the presence of real human voice, facial expressions and bodily gestures? Lạc is a recitation of some verses from „Truyện Kiều“ – an epic poem, a classic in Vietnamese literature, done by a robot voice and accompanied by triggered synthesized sounds that follow closely every movement in the robot voice. I wanted to see how the deprivation of human voice and emotion changes the meaning, musicality and other expressions in the language. How that feels to decontextualize my mother tongue?