(Coming but might not be soon)

Photographs, found objects, videos, sound, embroidery.

In the summer of 2016, I received an email from a stranger—a married man, who revealed his physical relationship with my partner. He conveyed his fervent love for her, along with his anguish and fury upon discovering that she was also unfaithful to him with others. By the end, he reached out, yearning for an empathetic reply that might relieve his burden of guilt. In that moment, I found myself enveloped in a strange mix of anger, curiosity, and a puzzling sense of sympathy for this man. Although I wanted to write back, I couldn’t find the words. 

Five years later, in search of a reply, I began sharing the email with Vietnamese men I encountered in my everyday life, whether they are acquaintances or absolute strangers. Despite long hours of intimate conversations, I struggled to translate them into writing. So, I fed excerpts from our talks into AI imaging software to see how they might take shape.

Drawing on AI-generated images, alongside the details from the email and collected responses, That way I feel more relieved is an endeavour to interpret intimacy and vulnerability visually. It is a way for me to process my thoughts and feelings, in hopes of creating a reply that might bring the sender of the email and myself some relief.

The final photographs are presented as diptychs alongside the AI-generated images in text encoding format.

In confronting the emotional turmoil evoked by the vivid and figurative language detailing each moment the sender shared with my lover, I relied on AI as a tool to construct a visual narrative that addresses both my imagination and curiosity. The resulting AI-generated video recites the content of the original email. By adopting the aesthetic of generic, often emotionless content prevalent across digital platforms, this work is an attempt to communicate my emotional distance from a deeply personal narrative—a distance that has grown through the process of repeatedly sharing and revisiting the email. Through this juxtaposition, I interrogate how technology shapes our personal experiences and emotional responses in an increasingly ocular-centric world. By tapping into a vast database of images, the use of AI reflects the influence of deep-rooted culture and mass media in Vietnam’s social fabric, and serves as a survey of how technology, and by extension our society, makes meaning through images.