By Hop Dac
2026
oil on canvas board
28x23cm framed
$2,300
ARTIST STATEMENT
"The reason why you take off your shoes at the door of a Vietnamese home is because much of life – cooking, eating, sleeping and worshipping – happens at the floor level.
‘Is Your House Behind That Mountain?’ was inspired by seeing a video of chef Thi Le chopping up an entire roast pig on the floor wearing a yellow ao dai at a relative’s wedding. It untapped memories, mostly of women, the true heads of their homes, who squatted on the ground, preparing huge feasts.
‘I Took Pictures Without Smiling’ recalls the first generation of men who suppressed their feelings but showed their wounds through self-immolation.
In reality these homes would be inundated with stuff to the point of hoarding, fuelled by a need to feel safe amongst the things we own, by a fear of forgetting.
The later generations of the Vietnamese diaspora aren’t the same floor dwellers of their parents and grandparents. We cook and eat at tables. We sleep on beds of memory foam.
It feels like a loss of connection of the body to the earth."
BIO
Hop Dac is a Vietnamese-Australian painter, printmaker and writer who came to Western Australia as a refugee in 1980. His family settled in Geraldton on the Western Australian coast and he studied Fine Art at Curtin University in Perth.
After moving to Melbourne in 2002 he eventually studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. For a time writing and editing was his focus and he has work published in Overland, The Saturday Paper, Peril Magazine and Kill Your Darlings (KYD). He worked in editorial roles for KYD between 2013 and 2016.
Hop resumed oil painting in 2021 after a ten-year hiatus. He has been a finalist for the Bayside Painting Prize (2025), Omnia Art Prize (2024), Biblio Art Prize (2022), National Emerging Art Prize (2022) and the Fremantle Print Award (1997).
He works and lives on Wadawurrung country (Geelong/Djilang, Australia) with his partner and their two daughters.