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Hoa

14-minute film, 2022











Before developing her memory disorders, my bà nội (paternal grandmother), Trần Thị Tuyết Hoa wrote an autobiographical book about her life & its events.

The book is titled “Hồi Ức Tuyết Hoa” (Memories of Tuyết Hoa), & subtitled “Khi Đất Nước Tôi Thanh Bình: Hồi ức của một nữ sinh viên Sài Gòn” (When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student).

She now reads this book everyday in her Hanoi home.

The footage & photographs were taken when I stayed with my ông bà nội for a month in their home in Hanoi during the summer of 2022, the first time I’ve been back to my home country in three years.

In the form of a visual & written poetic letter, “Hoa” is dedicated to my bà nội, from me, a Vietnamese grandchild.





Solo ExhibitionGallery 310, February 27th - March 10th, 2023
Two-Channel Projection & Photography
School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University







For decades, the United States dropped three times more bombs in Vietnam than every country ever did in Europe in World War II. The Vietnam War was a crime against humanity caused by the American imperialist war machine, & it affects my people to this day. This war has changed the history of Vietnam, my country, my home, forever.

But the Vietnam I know today is totally different from the Vietnam my elders know. As 70% of the population of Vietnam is under 35 years old, the Vietnamese youth are constantly creating new subcultures & communities. Although it’s crucial to not forget the bodies that brought us here, & the bodies that never got to grow old. My bà nội did.

My bà nội, Tuyết Hoa, is a woman with many lives, even if she cannot remember them, I hope this project helps me & others remember her, or at least, her name.












Media & Press

All About Movies |  Interview, 2024









Festivals & Screenings





















    LEAVE/ENTER/STAY




“When you enter the gallery and turn right past the sheet of black curtains, we invite you to sit and turn towards Trâm Anh Nguyễn’s poetry film, Hoa (2022), projected onto a West-side facing wall in the main space with an accompanying scrolling letter. Over the course of Hoa’s fourteen minute run-time, a gentle dialogue unfolds between the narrator, Nguyễn, and his grandmother, Tuyết Hoa, who was suffering from a memory disorder. She has written an autobiographical book that she reads every day and revisits with Nguyễn in the film. 
As Nguyễn is pulled into his family history, his grandmother’s ailment intensifies a need to resurface forgotten thoughts. “Do you remember feeling?” Nguyễn asks, tightly holding the daily ritual of his grandmother’s re-remembering. The film moves between contemporary footage of the streets of Huế, and Hoa in her home, interspersed with old photographs from Hoa’s younger years; the present shrouded in the past, the lives of grandmother and grandson coalescing in the certitude of a lineage connected by body. The porous nature of memory carries within it a departure and a return, the inherent gaps of one’s recollection are filled with assumptions, abandoning accuracy. Is leaving a form of returning? Ultimately, Hoa honors the value of presence shared with an elder; the present being the crux of future and past, the deepness of love that sprouts from loss.”


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  • Photo documentation by Alison Postma.









  • xpace.info/exhibition-event/
    leave-enter-stay-curated-by-triptych


  • “LEAVE/ENTER/STAY is a participatory exhibition
    • rooted in repetition, spatial perception, and gestures of intimacy. Anchoring the cyclical process of LEAVE/ENTER/STAY are works by Winta Hagos, Trâm Anh Nguyễn, Bahar Enshaeian, Sabine Spare, and artistic duo Farida Rady and Darian Razdar.


  • Slipping between states of presence,the previous feeling trailing into the next, and finding a future behind our backs.
  • Grief is remembering a presence, remembering is forgetting an absence, and eachlingering sensation welcomes a new feeling.So where do we go from here, when each daylasts forever, ending and beginning again?”


  • - TRIPTYCH



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