Growing up in Paris raised by Vietnamese parents, artist Nhu Xuan Hua never felt fully connected to her roots. It was only when she grew older and moved away, and simultaneously lost her grandmother, that she first felt a pressing need to learn more about her origins. Her book “Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory,” in which she digitally alters carefully sourced family photos, is a step towards that deeper understanding. She tells Marigold Warner about how the project has become a commentary on how memories, emotions and traumas can be both inherited and lost, and her determination to make sure her family history won’t be forgotten again.
In science, the word “Tropism” describes an automatic reaction of an organism—like a sunflower leaning toward light. In her novel “Tropisms,” French writer Nathalie Sarraute appropriates this terminology to describe the small, often hidden reactions that subtly influence our behaviours and relationships. This idea underlies French-Vietnamese photographer Nhu Xuan Hua’s book, “Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory.” She presents a series of digitally-altered family photographs—part of a journey of understanding her heritage and a commentary on how memories, emotions and traumas can be both inherited and lost.
Hua was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris by Vietnamese parents, but she felt a disconnection to her roots. “They spoke to me [and my brother] in Vietnamese, but they never forced us to respond,” she says. “They were focused on assimilation and wanting us to present ourselves as French. They were never ashamed of our culture, but they didn’t push us to be proud of it either.”
Hua remembers being the only Asian kid in school, with questions about her origins that were often left unanswered. “My parents didn’t share much about their past, especially the war,” she says. “We’ll never know exactly what they went through emotionally, because I was never forced to move out of a place that I love and consider home.” In 2012, Hua moved to London, in her 20s at the time. “I became myself in London,” she says. “I learned how to communicate and understand myself as an adult.” This, along with her grandmother’s death a year later and the sale of her home in Belgium—”the anchor of our family”—fuelled Hua to begin a physical and emotional journey to learn about her origins.
Since 2016, Hua has been travelling to Vietnam, but also to Belgium and Canada, visiting members of her family to collect documents, photographs and undocumented oral histories. “It was like a race against time to collect information and make sure that things wouldn’t be forgotten again,” she says. The artist had been to Vietnam twice as a child, but this was her first time visiting as an adult. “Everything came rushing back—the heat, the smells—the moment I set my foot on the ground,” she recalls. “At passport control the Vietnamese officer read my name the way it was supposed to be pronounced…this stranger just said my name correctly, and it made me feel so reconnected.”
In her journey to collect these misplaced memories, Hua recalls a chapter in “The Origin of Others” by Toni Morrison. The author considers the structures of otherness in our era of mass migration, and within those broader themes, she talks about the act of remembering “as piecing together a puzzle,” says Hua. “I love this analogy, because that’s how you feel when you have missing elements of your history. You feel incomplete.” This closely relates to the technical process behind the Tropism project. First, Hua picks a family photograph that she connects with—“without trying to ask why”—and uses a simple algorithmic tool in photoshop to remove the figures and replace the gaps with visual matter based on the information surrounding it. “It’s like reinventing a story based on elements that already exist—I found this parallel very poetic,” she says.
The last photograph in “Tropism” is the only image in the book taken by Hua. It announces a sequel that will be based on her own memories, but she is still working on what that will look like. After making the first chapter, exhibiting it and publishing a book, “I needed a break,” she says. “An emotional and mental break from having to share so much of my intimate journey, and therefore the one of an entire community yearning to be seen and heard. It was a lot to carry on an everyday basis for a year and a half, even though I felt so grateful and empowered.”
After leaving London during the pandemic, Hua now lives back in Paris, where she balances fine art with commercial projects for clients like Dior, Maison Margiela, Time, and British Vogue. She doesn’t see a distinction between her conceptual art and fashion work. Interestingly, as she began to explore her own identity, she noticed how she was unconsciously seeking out Asian models for her commercial projects. “I didn’t notice immediately,” she says, “but the women I shot began to resemble women from my family...even though it was a fashion story, it became a narrative of my observations and experiences.”
That, in a way, is tropism too. Perhaps surfacing in an uncanniness that instinctively imbues all of Hua’s work, and existing in that liminal space between reality and a dream. By speaking to her family and rooting through their archives, Hua experienced this osmosis of memories and how they can travel through generations. “For me, this inherited memory is more about energies and cosmology,” she says. While we can’t directly relate to the traumas and histories of generations before us, we still feel the weight of that history—often without even noticing. “I like to explore that moment that you can’t really grasp,” she says. “Through my visual practice, I can manage to get my hands on it…to grasp something that is not meant to be tangible.”