Identity politics are at the heart of my work. As a Vietnamese-American male, my paintings explore the many dualities that I inhabit--east vs. west, tradition vs. modernity, faith vs. reality--and how they can lead to a sense of displacement. My work attempts to document the transmutable and subjective nature of our identities. For the past three years, I have painted exclusively in a black and white grisaille method to mimic the documentary nature of black and white photography. I subvert this documentary language by cutting and pasting different realities to form a convincing new one. Time and space are ambiguous. Consequently, the figure is caught in an eternal limbo. This limbo is the space where one searches for, and creates a sense of self. Many of my images are specific and portrait oriented. With the Boat People Series, I attempt to point out how our identity can become linked to a larger event that may override our individual personality. This event can cause whatever specificity we have to blend and blur, until we are but ghosts of ourselves (Boat People III and IV). After visiting Vietnam for the first time two years ago, I realized that there had been a long standing tradition in the culture of working in black and white. Often times, artists were asked to enlarge a small photograph of an ancestor into a large drawing that could appear on a family altar, or in some cases, on the tomb of the deceased. Knowing this, I have begun making very large faux-ancestral drawings using the Vietnamese method, ve voi bot ve sot. In Transients, I am not trying to capture the person—in sharp focus with high attention to detail--but rather, I am interested in capturing the idea of losing the person to memory.