The cultural history I reference revolves around the Vietnam War, specifically the tactics of biological warfare employed during that conflict. For nearly ten years, rainbow colored herbicides inundated the Vietnamese countryside–Agent Orange being the most widely known–causing the mass devastation of agriculture, killing and maiming thousands of people as well as leaving in its wake a legacy of generation upon generation of birth defects.

I am attempting to tackle a history that is larger than myself while also searching for identity through a dense abstract visual language. The process of painting is a meditation on understanding this history. As a first generation Vietnamese-American born to parents who immigrated to the United States during the Vietnam War, I was raised not feeling fully American and also distant to Vietnam. My work responds to this cultural duality through the creation of ambiguous landscapes of the internal.

-Simon Tran aka ghost ghost teeth