This project is a personal experience of the artist to create an intersection between the unconscious, subconscious, and conscious world of the characters and his own unconscious, subconscious, and conscious world via a theme of contemporary fashion among Vietnamese youth

Shares Chiron Duong, “We live in a parallel world of development and fluctuations in all fields. All these invisible waves can easily drown out our own emotions and make us forget the elements that have sculpted us into the present. All of us, especially the younger generation, are at risk of easily falling into confusion between social morality and personal emotions, sinking into internal conflicts in addition to conflicts taking place everywhere in the world. This project aims to find the inner voices of young people and keep their memories warm or light up their beautiful wishes on the journey of living with the beauty of darkness and light intertwined. 27 young people from many fields around me answered a series of questions aimed at accessing their subconscious and conscious worlds. From their special answers, I have integrated them into photo concepts.” 

Duong continues, “We can easily find fantasy worlds using AI tools, but the fantasy worlds in this project are built from the minds and real activities of the characters and they contain the energy of Surname. Each character has different movements, some move like stone, and some move like wood, water, wind, etc. During the process of making this photo series, they also reveal unconscious movements, alternating conscious actions. This is strongly linked to “Livingness” as we integrate our mind and body and experience into realities other than external life: Imagine you are making a chair out of grapefruit peels, Imagine you are hugged tightly by a tree and ants bite you, how long has it been since you had these feelings?”

“Along with the feeling of ‘livingness’, the cultural expressions of Vietnam flow in the blood of these characters. They are the young generation in Vietnam, living amid the spiritual and cultural diversity of many cultural streams from across the country,” the artist concludes.