Woven into Vo Tran Chau’s practice is the intrinsic emotionality of found fabrics and used clothes, retaining within them ambiguous, yet still pertinent histories. The act of threading together her squares of textile is as though a reconstruction of the stories lost in grand narratives. In her earlier works, Vo Tran Chau navigates various sites with cultural or personal significance, subjecting them to a pixelation that draws attention to the murky waters of history. The images, blurred from view, evade our attempts to see and point to the very nature of memory: hazy, and at times wilfully amnesic. In more recent works, the artist continues to explore the act of remembering, this time with those whose histories overlap her own. Her encounters with Jeju Island – its textile techniques, the personal stories, and the religious practice of Muism – inform her spiritually-charged works, asking further questions of life and death and reincarnation. Through her method of image making, Vo Tran Chau recognises the depth of historical wounds passed down the generations, and stitches them back as a way to heal. ...
