Lê Thuý
Hoi An

Often misunderstood as antithetical to speech or as the mere absence of sound, silence plays a crucial part in human communication. For the Hoi An-based artist, the complex phenomenon also serves as a repository for emotions, as well as a force of oppression. 

In her watercolor-on-silk painting Rumination of life and death (2023), an eerie quietness overtakes the figure of a woman cradling her child beside a wooden table. Their faces inscrutable, the woman and child appear to be in an otherworldly, yellow-green wasteland. The tender depiction of motherhood is further disrupted by the skull on which the infant’s right foot rests, and an unlit ceramic oil lamp ominously positioned on the table. In Vietnamese tradition, lamps are placed on ancestral altars and serve as protection against evil spirits. Without a flame, Lê’s mother and child are at the mercy of their desolate environment, suspended in a soundless realm between life and death.