By Hop Dac
2025
oil on canvas board
23x28cm framed
$1,600
ARTIST STATEMENT
"It’s the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War ending this year. The first generation of adult boat people are reaching old age. The young children that they brought with them, like me, or that they had shortly after they settled in their new homes, the one-and-a-half generation, now wrestle with this legacy of migration.
Each subsequent generation after the migration of a people, is a poorer facsimile of its culture, language and identity. For Vietnamese-Australians my age, a grieving process began when we started having children, and realised much of the work we had to do to be ready for this transition still had to be done.
What do we keep and what will be lost? Can you maintain culture when you haven’t properly healed? What do we grieve and what do we celebrate in this hybrid world? Much of my work, including these two pieces, use elements of symbology and nostalgia to ask these questions."
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 work published in Overland, Peril Magazine, the Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings and various anthologies. Hop works and lives on Wadawurrung country with his partner and their two daughters.