Artist Statement
My father, who had been incarcerated during my childhood for embezzlement, left our family behind in 2010 to return to Vietnam in pursuit of a new life, a land he initially escaped from during the war by falsifying his birth records. Nearly a decade later from his absence in my life, I traveled to Vietnam after his sudden stroke, and learned of his unexpected brain cancer diagnosis, the severity of which would greatly limit his mobility and lifespan in the coming months. As his health began to wane drastically, and my feelings of deepened alienation and betrayal resurfaced, my father in an attempt to mend our relationship made a proposition to collaborate upon a series of photographs during my last week with him, documenting what was ultimately an unsuccessful journey to recovery.
In the wake of his passing, our brief collaboration unveiled the irremediable complexities and tensions left between us. An allegory inverted, my Prodigal’s Father voyaging outwards for success and phantasmal glory at the abandonment of his son, now confronted by the evidence of his own shame; myself, and the camera between us recording it. As he raised me amidst the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the anxieties he held during and prior to his time in prison only amplified; fearing the home we had would be relinquished, the ground under him sinking, the notion of ownership now barred by constriction and a web of financial insolvency.
I’ve begun returning to his mother’s home in Hawaii, and uncovered a briefcase of letters he had kept since my childhood, letters sent between my father, myself, and the justice system. On my last return, I was gifted his ashes, and scattered half of them in the Pacific Ocean, and another half into the forests of Hawaii. These only further unveiled my personal paradox as his son: caught between obligation and forgiveness, handling the evidence of a man trying to erase himself.
