altar-making: an everyday ceremony
Ancestral altars in Vietnam transcend class, religious traditions, and cultural backgrounds. Through a multiplicity of shapes and forms, altars are a sacred space in Vietnamese homes for the personal, familial, spiritual, and afterlife. They serve as sites to venerate deities and gods, communicate with ancestors, make offerings of gratitude, pray for good fortune, and receive protection, guidance and blessings.
The practice of altar-making has come with us in the refugee diaspora, too, as an imperative space for veneration. My fascination with altars started with realizing there was a space for the unworldly in our material reality—a sliver that invites the in-between of life and death—speaking to the interconnectedness of all living beings. In this practice, I’ve found a beautiful way of dealing with death and the shadow of grief that follows. I didn’t really know my grandparents. Many of them died before I was born. But I see their faces and reminders of them often because they are on my family’s altar. And every year, on the anniversaries of their deaths, a party or meal is made in their honor. It’s a beautiful thing, living with the dead. Even in death, life is celebrated.
In altar-making, I seek to understand this long standing practice and make meaning out of it for myself, as an everyday ceremony. This exhibition is my invitation for you to join me in this learning process. it stand out.
About Breaking Tradition
There are plenty of rules around altars and their rituals, such as how things should be arranged, what type and color flowers you can use, how many times you lại and xá, and even the gender of the first-born looking after their parents’ altar. As a queer person engaging in altar-making, something feels subversive about it, even though I know that queerness has always existed among the indigenous people of Vietnam. The point of learning this tradition is not to replicate old ways as a means of grasping at my culture, having to have grown up outside of my homeland, as tempting as that is. This is the practice of the most accessible forms of communion with my ancestors. As I continue to learn about this tradition, how can I make it mine in a way that honors our ancestors, including the ones excluded from history?
What cultural traditions do you want to subvert (with your Queerness)? How will you do it?
Ceramics
People always want to make more elaborate offerings: towers of perfectly selected fruit, abundant plates of food, and piles of desserts, which is more a symbol of a family’s monetary wealth than about their ample good fortune. Vietnamese folklore speaks about your heart when you are making the offerings, and I believe that to be true.
As I practice altar-making myself, I think about the shapes and forms of the vessels that hold our prayers, offerings, and messages. Having the vessels, made by my hands, on the altars are in a way their own offering.
What kind of offering can you make with your own hands? 
Photographs
When I return to the homeland, the first sites that I always visit are my grandparents' graves. It is imperative, as a form of filial piety but also as a homecoming. There are ways to greet your elders when entering a home, and this is one of them. Upon entering this exhibition, please take a moment with these photos, and feel free to light some incense at the altar and greet my bà ngoại and ông ngoại.
How do you commune with your ancestors? 
Teapots
It's absurd to let meals get cold in a Vietnamese home. When I was younger, I was confused when rice was served into bowls, and we waited for them to get cold before eating together. But this is one of the daily observations, setting the table for the ancestors. It was because we did not eat until the ancestors had eaten.
What kind of offering can you make with your own hands? 
Poetry
When spirits walk alongside us in this life, we can be protected, but we can also be haunted. Some writers say they feel called to write. When I began writing, I felt haunted by grief. There was always an unending sadness, a lingering atrocity, and the ever-present anger around the corner of my sentences. When my words formed, I knew they wanted revenge.
If laying a body to rest, and feeding their hungry souls at the altar is one way of protecting yourself against angry spirits, then what of all the folks who were not able to be venerated or even buried because of war and colonization? Families can choose not to have altars because they are too painful. Remembering hurts. And trauma can be so relentless. Human atrocities sever these life-giving connections to the spiritual world. I can now understand the ways in which transgenerational trauma gets passed down through the body and spirit. Sometimes my words come from the past and sometimes they come from the future.
What has been passed down to you from your ancestors (the ones you know personally, and the ones you don't? What roles have they played in shaping your creative practice, your guiding belief systems, and your heart?