Phi Phi Oanh constructs pictorial installations of evocative meditative spaces. Drawing from the hybrid nature of her personal history, she reconfigures culturally specific signs and symbols to create familiar yet unusual and distinctive experiential places. The Pro Se series of works by Phi Phi Oanh continues the artist’s investigation of the relationship between lacquer and visuality but through a meditation on contemporary experiences of image-making and viewing, adopting a small format which draws similarity to the now normalised viewing experiences on hand-held digital devices. The Pro Se - Vivarium series of paintings attempt to hold still and record, in lacquer form, our relationship to the earth and our will towards the domestication and objectification of nature around us. Representing terrarium jars, paludariums, aquariums, or mossariums, the works are conceived as vestiges of this epoch currently hanging in delicate balance and as iconography of its human centered gaze. Through a process of accumulating layers of lacquer and subtracting them by sanding, a type of realism in Vietnamese lacquer painting is explored resulting in images that appear to be fossilised with time while maintaining a realist aesthetic. For the artist, " this lacquer realism is more involved with the slippery ever-changing experience of sight and of memory which [she] considers to be son ta’s [Vietnamese natural lacquer] major potential contribution to the field of painting.”
![Pro Se (mapping series) - [map of Singapore]](https://www.roots.gov.sg/api/media/3791b6b6-24fc-4ce0-9f70-e1f8ab99b2e1/1420237.jpg)
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