Quynh Dong, Journal d'amour, communiqué de presse 2024

“My hands hold tight to my grandfather's hands.
The ship leaves the harbor and takes me into the cold sea air. I remember my grandparents standing at the gate of the harbor. The ship is leaving, and I have left my love, my world, my home, my feelings at the port.”

Initiated with her own reminiscence, 'Diary of love' - Quynh Dong's latest video artwork is an experimentation to explore the concept of love.

This work focuses on the intersection of images from the mass culture archive, as well as the exploration and integration of painting, sculpture, performance, and moving images. Conceptually, the artist raises the question of the evaluation of art through the medium of moving images. How does one tell an emotion in a story? What narratives belong to film, and how does one handle the narrative of a story in art, particularly the narrative of the story as sculpture?

A video work initiated by her own memory, this work is an experimental short film exploring the concept of love—beyond solely the romantic, but as a broader, universal, complex and multifaceted emotion. It integrates painting, moving image, performance and sculpture simultaneously, revealing Dong's fascination and mastery of movimg image as a means to challenge our understanding of each medium.

Taking a deeply personal and emotional experience as a point of departure, Dong recalls how she had left Vietnam via boat, bidding farewell to her grandparents. She articulates this specific moment as a loss of love:

“My hands hold tight to my grandfather's hands.
The ship leaves the harbour and takes me into the cold sea air. I remember my grandparents standing at the gate of the harbour. The ship is leaving, and I have left my love, my world, my home, my feelings at the port.”

Diary of Love is an attempt to portray the varying aspects and states of such an intricate emotion. Love is not linear, nor singular; it can be longing or yearning; it changes over time. Love is family, it is our country; Love could be what we think we know. The dancers in Dong’s film encapsulate the nuances and possibilities through their movement, albeit piecemeal and unassuming. Over a year in the making, from storyboard to filming, Diary of Love references images from popular culture, poetically reflecting on how media influences our social behaviour today.

Conceptually, Dong also raises the question of moving images as a medium through this solo presentation: How does one tell an emotion in a story? What narratives belong to film? Is there a definitive start and end to this story? Diary of Love is deliberately crafted and left open as a narrative, allowing for the different ‘chapters’ to be experienced as a sculpture, even a painting, which we can continually return to and interact with from another vantage point.