The Emperor's Offsprings

          (upcoming)

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The Emperor’s Offsprings is a 10-piece installation whereby I invite viewers to examine how power has been practiced throughout human history — by means of transparency or obscurantism, enhancing bondage or liberty, war-making or peace-seeking, etc... These opposite properties are not always presented in a clear, immutable, binary way, but as shifting contingencies, thus confounding human behavior and moral judgment.

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As a symbol of power, I employ the figure of the ancient bronze drum of Vietnam. Excavated in great numbers in Northern Vietnam and dated from the second century BC, those drums bear carvings that depict plumaged people riding boats, hunting, cultivating rice – believed to be the early Vietnamese. As Vietnamese society morphed from a matriarchal community into a highly hierarchical patriarchal one, the drum’s function shifted from an instrument to call for communal gathering or for honoring ancestors, to enforcing discipline and exhorting war.

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By manipulating the materials the drums are made of, and the space, sound and images embedded in them, I express the ramifications of power.

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Furthermore the metaphor of The Emperor’s Offsprings is intended to reflect on inheritance and complicity of the individual viewer — how each of us absorbs, reproduces, or disrupts the systems of power woven around us. It challenges viewers to confront their own position within these dynamic fields, not as distant observers or victimized inheritors, but as active participants.

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Ultimately, the work resists simple resolution, instead opening a space to consider ethical action that cannot be renounced, even under ambiguous conditions