Glass Closet, Secret Egg is a series of images that dramatize the way humans interact with the space that contains them. In exploring the subtleties of gestures and expressions, it seeks to reveal meaningful insights into another culture, another state of mind.
Dat selected these photographs while working and traveling in between places, in Vietnam and in the States. Through these photographs, he hopes to immerse the viewers in an estranged feeling, almost like a dream sequence imbued with imagination and free association. He wants to provoke questions and to stir the web of consciousness tying these images together.
His personal motivation to create these images is an urge to grapple with visual meanings and their implications, especially based on his experience of feeling rootless throughout his early twenties.
Biography
Dat Vu is a Vietnamese photo artist born in Saigon in 1991. He studied overseas in Singapore and the US for about 10 years before returning to Vietnam in 2016. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with High Honors in Art Studio from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT, USA) in 2015. In his work, he is strongly concerned with the idea of representation, intervention and performance. Having grown up in many different places, from Saigon to Singapore to Connecticut, he relies on photography to explore, to become familiar with each new environment, and to form his identity beyond cultural and national borders.
He develops his visual language with an inclination towards spatial forms, physical gestures, human behaviors and relationships. Through the medium, he grapples with the contexts and concepts that define himself: gender, race and politics. In turn, his photographic practice evolves, going from straight documentary to decontextualization and deconstruction. He seeks new visual vocabularies while maintaining an understanding of the symbols and their nuanced meanings.
He constantly thinks about reality in photography, how everyone is oftentimes more fascinated by an obvious fact photographs may represent, rather than their possibilities. He wants to push his practice in a direction that engages with the audience about social norms, about fabricating a photographic reality. In doing this, he looks forward to combining photography with other media, such as installation, performance art and video.