“Midway Shopping Plaza was inspired [after] I moved to Philadelphia about five years ago, not far from a Vietnamese neighbourhood—which I was very fortunate to be in because I love pho. I would go to this pho restaurant, and…they had this sign. For all these various shops and so on—like you’d find at Jane and Finch—anywhere. Except this one day, there’s a ceremony by these veteran South Vietnamese soldiers, and they’re all old, they’re all wearing their South Vietnamese soldier’s uniforms. They took down the stars and stripes, they rolled up the old South Vietnamese flag, and then they played the Vietnamese anthem. So the flag doesn’t exist anymore, the country doesn’t exist anymore. The status of South Vietnam doesn’t exist anymore. They were on the losing side. I wasn’t so interested in the question of who should be the proper victors in that conflict. But I was kind of touched by—as I was eating my soup [and] looking out the window—this whole ceremony. And I started thinking about how—I guess to a degree, it’s narcissism on my part, because I was looking at this and thinking, life is a long road. I ended up in this neighborhood full of Vietnamese, obviously many of the Vietnamese families there came as boat people post-war or even during the war. And [they’ve] seen a terrible tragedy, and they’ve made this neighbourhood their home, and so on. The Midway Shopping Plaza was kind of an allegory of that because all the names of the shops are actually names of principals and events and battles that were significant to the Vietnam War.”
Art & Influence
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Midway Shopping Plaza, 2014
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