Scraping Wind

sequel to hollistic sorrow

this piece was my graduation thesis for my BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art

featured in the honors graduation exhibit at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle

"Having caught wind of her mother's solitary shouldering of a baggage filled with lamentation, mixed with an equivalent part of sour melancholy, Tuong Vo picked up the ancient treatment known as cạo gió in Vietnamese (literally translate to "scraping wind"), hoping that with each stroke that lands on the skin of her mother, all the negative energies would be alleviated. the process cannot be done without the burning red marks that occupy the skin surface where friction is introduced, and their healing cannot come without their repressed agonies coming to the surface.

The video installation depicts Vo's attempt to mimic the process of scraping wind from her mother's body in the form of scree-printing, accompanied by the voice-over of her mother who's relaying her personal memories of Vo's grandmother. Vo superimposes a letter addressed to her mother over a screen-printed image of her mother's back after the wind scraping has been done, with the letter being composed in the handwriting of her late grandmother (which vo had extracted for a project prior to this). Vo's grandmother is a recurring central figure who continues to inspire her oeuvre and posthumously buttresses vo's relationship with her mother."

Tuong (Julie) Vo, 2024