ARTIST STATEMENT

"I had a dream when I was about four or five of flying over paddy fields and I remembered the dream all through my childhood, but it wasn’t until I was back in Vietnam, about to turn 21, that I knew what the dream was. My mother and I were visiting my father’s family in Can Tho, in the Mekong Delta where I had lived the first few years of my life, where his father had been a rice farmer.
 

I have travelled a long way with the water, from the Mekong to the Dinh, the Swan to the Chapman, Greenough, Yarra and now Barwon. My earliest memory is from when I was two or three, walking along the riverbank, cool clay underfoot, and seeing a group of shouting men with an enormous turtle they had pulled from the river, restraining its limbs and neck with black cord, and another man, his back to me, clutching a machete.
 

I know my father is scared witless of the water monsters that lurk at river mouths.
 

The images in Sông mơ (Dream River) are like the murmur of flowing water, carrying glimpses of dreams, memories and stories that surface and submerge and surface again until they are almost indistinguishable. And I don’t always know if the memory I have was a story I heard long ago."


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.