Buffalo is Hop Dac’s second solo exhibition with Boom. It uses symbology and narrative to explore ideas of cultural loss and identity in the Vietnamese diaspora from the perspective of the one-and-a-half generation in middle age. 

Hop Dac is a highly regarded Vietnamese-Australian artist based in Geelong. We are excited to exhibit Buffalo, his latest body of work here at Boom. Hop has seen an ever increasing and very enthusiastic collector base and his work is held in many private collections both in Australia and Internationally.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"Originally this exhibition was going to be called Firefly, after the pen name my late grandfather used to write poetry, ‘Phi Huynh’. In 2024 I’d enlisted a literary translator to work on a collection of my Ong Noi’s poems. My plan was to develop work around the poems, the process of their translation and their place in my family as part of the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. Unfortunately, in May of this year, things stopped working out with the translator, but I still had a show to put together.

Late last year my parents came to visit me from WA. I drove them to the western suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne ­– where there is a large population of Vietnamese Australians – to visit their friends, who still lived in the same house they had lived in since arriving in Australia. I took a lot of reference photos in the house and afterwards, I painted Sunshine in this exhibition.

After the work with the translator fell through and I started picking up the pieces, I kept going back to the buffalo, as a symbol of wanting to keep culture alive, something that I’d also wanted to do with my grandfather’s poems. It made total sense to name this exhibition after it. I also returned to monotypes, which I’d studied at art school, and which allowed me to further explore these themes along the level of symbolic narrative, something I find increasingly evocative.

My Ong Noi was a poet and a rice farmer ­– he would have known water buffalo as well as anyone. The original project is still going and I’ll start again the process of looking for a translator."

BIO
 

Hop Dac is a Vietnamese-Australian painter and writer. He studied Fine Art at Curtin University in Perth and moved to Melbourne in 2002 where he eventually studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. He has been a finalist for the Bayside Painting Prize, the Omnia Art Prize, the National Emerging Art Prize, the Biblio Art Prize and the Fremantle Print Award. Hop works and lives on Wadawurrung country with his partner and their two daughters.