Trinh Mai
Spiritual Art Grant Recipient
Artist Statement
As my work shares insight into personal life experiences, it also communicates the messages that have found their rhythms in the human experience to remind us that there is nothing new under the sun.
As a second-generation Vietnamese American, art has become an invaluable tool that has granted me the opportunity to live the refugee, immigrant experiences vicariously through the ones who arrived before me, allowing me to interpret these stories through my own ears, eyes and hands. With deep respect, I bind these inherited stories into our witnessing of history’s alliteration, of persecution and injustice, of mass exodus and the tribulations that we continue to face upon arrival, and of the anticipated opportunities that indeed await us on new horizons as we set our gaze upon home and promise.
I believe in the intimate relationship between suffering and transformation, in all its glory. My work seeks to retell human narratives in our humility, which can reveal the greatness of the divine and expose the sublime. I believe in the power of storytelling and art and its ability to repair the irreparable. These are the channels through which I connect my spiritual to my earthly existence, to tell the stories that we might all share, making the intangible tangible and the unseen visible, and somehow, offering comfort in the seemingly unbearable. Art is one form of my study and prayer, and through my work, I share this journey that is ours, through this trying and blessèd life. (excerpt)
How to Forgive, Bà Ngoại’s (Grandmother) thread, dầu khuynh diệp (eucalyptus oil) as gifted by my mother-in-law Dì Ba, and graphite encased in hand-built wooden light box, 12" x 12”
How to Forgive begins as a letter written to my father. In it, I ask for his forgiveness for my own trespasses while offering the same. As I contemplate forgiveness as choice, word becomes flesh and materializes into the textual and textural.
The title How to Forgive does not offer a solution or method for how to go about beseeching or offering forgiveness, but rather considers the manner in which we might proceed toward reconciliation with willingness, tenderness, and humility. As each particular situation requires different approaches, How to Forgive examines possible advances toward healing—even if not an outwardly resolve, but a movement of grace toward the center of the place that insists on judgement.
I consider forgiveness as likened unto generosity, in that the mere expression may be insufficient in transforming the giver and/or receiver. As true generosity does not lie simply in the act of giving, but rather in a giving that is offered with a generous heart, a true forgiveness might grow from this same vine—one that is born from the spirit, rooted in the heart, and with the hope to perpetuate good, abolishing the shackles with which unforgiveness has arrested the offenders as much as the offended. This kind of forgiveness illuminates the darkness wherein resentment and bitterness can implant itself before festering in our hearts like a relentless mold that poisons our interior. True forgiveness, like true generosity, is done in love, sometimes silently and offered without request, when the love and concern for another far surpasses the desire to yoke their wrists, and ours, with unforgiveness, even with the recognition of wrongdoing.
The lightbox presents a choice. These words of forgiveness are only made visible by choosing to pull/loosen the chain that will illuminate the text. It is this light that can guide us closer toward the ways of forgiveness, should we choose to see and know and respond.
Further echoing the private practice of forgiveness, the words are kept quiet, handwritten in my father’s mother tongue, from right to left and in mirror-reverse en verso. It is mended with threads inherited from Bà Ngoại whose faith made her swift to forgive. A paint stroke of eucalyptus oil, gifted by Dì Ba as a healing ointment, provides a space for light to penetrate. This aperture, through which forgiveness can be more clearly visible, offers just a portion of the love letter as encouragement for those who wrestle with these same undertakings in seeking and offering pardon.
How to Forgive is an ever-emergent work in the studio as in life.
Begins with Tea, Family photos printed on joss paper, grains, seeds, herbs, and dried noodles from Bà Ngoại’s (Grandmother) kitchen, encapsulated in Bà Ngoại’s used tea bags, hung from Bà Ngoại's sewing needles (gifted by Chị Tu, her eldest grandchild, and gifted to me by Cô Bé), installed with wood-handled, hand-sized hammer that once belonged to her oldest sister, Bà Tien. 4 1/2" x 1 3/4" each of 212 pieces
While my 85-year old Bà Ngoại sips her afternoon tea, she shares with me stories of old as childhood memories and cookie crumbs scatter before us upon her dining table. I had begun saving her tea bags and filling them with old photographs from our family archive, encapsulating these photos in Bà Ngoại's used tea bags to signify our time together during which these precious memories are relived. The contents consist of seeds, herbs, grains and noodles, which are used in traditional Vietnamese dishes, many of whose recipes were passed down to her by her mother, and her mother’s mother, and most likely her mother’s mother’s mother, trickling far down the maternal lineage, perhaps gently altered by each generation of heirs. I've gathered these ingredients from her pantry, along with seeds from the fruits found in her kitchen and plucked from her garden. And as I incorporate them into these delicate pockets, I marvel in the thought that every living thing, and all its succeeding generations, are born from seed.
Free Birds, Rice sack and fabric inherited from Ba Ngoại (Grandmother), cotton harvested from the farms in which my husband and his family labored, textile, rice, found wire egg carrier
A prayer for the ones who long to be free.
After they escaped the war in Việt Nam in 1982, my husband and his family arrived in San Francisco. They soon moved to Bakersfield where land and work were plenty. At a very young age, Hiền spent his days toiling in the fields with them, alongside neighboring migrant farmers.
They were granted little assistance and scraped for sustenance, a common refugee experience. Earth provided for them; the surplus from the day’s good harvest found its way into their bellies. The song birds did too. During that era, farmers trapped birds in giant cages to keep them away from their crops. Hiền’s family would collect them as food; Hiền’s mother sewed rice sacks into a drawstring bags to keep them. At the age of five or six, Hiền asked if he could help catch birds. His mother let him into the cage, and after some time, he caught a little brown bird in his small hands. He was instantly alarmed by its body heat and its rapid heartbeat, which caused him to immediately let go of the bird. When his father asked Hiền why he let it go, the young boy responded, "It was afraid, and I didn’t want to see it afraid." His father—a surviving prisoner of war—honored his son’s compassion, and asked him if he wanted to free the other birds. Hiền replied with a convicting "yes" before his father told him, If you want them to be free, then you must be the one to set them free. His father helped him unknot the sack, and that day, they let all of the birds go.
I was deeply moved by this young child’s compassion. My heart expanded at the manner in which Hiền’s father honored his son’s heart—one that was tender toward the living.
Free Birds began in 2019 with a need to relive Hiền’s memory by holding this bird in my hand. With Ba Ngoại’s (Grandmother) gingham fabric, I crafted the first bird, stuffing it with cotton harvested from those same fields that provided for Hiền’s family. The second bird was made from Ba Ngoại’s rice sack, hearkening to both Hiền’s mother’s preparation, and Ba Ngoại’s memory of sewing rice sacks and military rucksacks into little backpacks for her ten children as they prepared for the escape from the motherland. This project dovetails memories lived and inherited from both of our lineages, composed in a shared longing for freedom for others and for ourselves.
Years later, Hiền took me to an abandoned carrot factory that remembers his family’s early history as working Americans. Here, we found a mysterious metal crate that we later learned was an egg carrier from the 1950s. After sitting in the corner of the studio for months, it began looking like a cage—one that obstructs free movement and free thought. The charm of finches are congested and assembled in orderly fashion to further illustrate this forced and monitored movement.
The Vietnamese greenfinches grew into a robust flock in commemorating these historical moments—eighty-two of them were made, signifying 1982, the year that Hiền and his family arrived in the United States. As time passes, the birds have been freed from their immediate surroundings; they've migrated into the homes of the ones who have stood with us—these ones who share in our heart for the least, the lost, and the last, the lonely, and the forgotten.
Bio
Trinh Mai is a California-based, Vietnamese American visual artist who pays respect to the details in her work as she hopes to do in life as she documents history, present, and hope for the future by utilizing a breadth of natural, traditional, and inherited media that hold histories of their own. She helps tell the stories of we, an enduring people, while focusing on our witnessing of war, the wounds we’ve survived, our collective need to heal, the longsuffering hope that carries us through deep waters, and the custodial responsibility to which we are heirs. She seeks the patience that is consistently offered through inspirational stories of human perseverance, the labor in her meticulous art practice, and the comfort in the beauty that is discovered throughout. Longing to bring the unknown into the known, the often-overlooked details in her work call to attention her efforts to be more sensitive toward the things that go unnoticed, the things that we take for granted, and the quiet moments when the profundity of life can speak so clearly to us. Her work examines the ways in which past weaves into present within our refugee and immigrant communities, while documenting the ways in which our nuanced experiences—communal and personal—are shared among all of humanity, then and now.
She was named Walker-Ames Guest Scholar by the University of Washington in 2019; introduced as inaugural visual artist for Berkeley’s Asian American Law Journal in 2020, to expound on the experiences of Southeast Asian families who have been affected by the immigration crisis; and was awarded the Professional Artist Fellowship by the Arts Council for Long Beach in 2021. In 2023, she was commissioned as inaugural muralist to paint a 185-foot mural about migration and freedom—her largest-scale painting to date—for the newly-renovated Tom Bradly International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. In 2024, she was awarded the Artist Practitioner Fellow at Brown University, and served as a California Creative Corps Fellow, developing arts programming for the empowerment of young women of Cambodian descent.
Her visual art, poetry, and analyses of her work have appeared in various publications including Fast Company Magazine (New York), the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement (Purdue University), Ruminate Magazine, and the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies (Yale University), and in the collaborative book of poetry and art with Shann Ray, Atomic Theory 7 : Poems to My Wife and God (Resource Publications). Mai’s work has been supported by Harvard University’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration & Rights, and Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity to speak on how the war in Việt Nam and the resilience of our people continues to affect generations of Vietnamese Americans in present day.
With a faith in the potential of our young people, Mai has exhibited in support of Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia, also at Oracle Arena with the Golden State Warriors to aid the Warriors Community Foundation in its mission in supporting education in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has had the privilege of working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to develop and facilitate art + science workshops for the Friends of Huế Foundation Children's Shelter in Việt Nam, also partnering with the International Rescue Committee to develop arts programming for refugee children from Africa, Mexico, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, providing them with creative expression in honoring home, heritage, history, and heroism. Seeking hope within humanity’s incessant struggle in war and hardship, she has also partnered with Oceanside Museum of Art, MiraCosta College, Community Engagement, and Bowers Museum in developing fine art projects that engage survivors of war.
Her artistic journey has been captured in the short documentary films Arise. Shine. Thy Light is Come. (Manoa Sky Films), and Honoring Life: The Work of Trinh Mai (The Artist Odyssey), which brought home the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film at the 2016 Viet Film Festival. Mai continues speaking about her art practice and engaging communities in creative storytelling, with the desire to help usher us into communal healing and an enduring hope that will help ground us in a fractured world.