About Me

Dear Studio,

I’m writing to you not as just a space, but as the sole witness to what I’ve become. You’ve seen me in the mornings before the world wakes up, heard me hum to myself as I mix paint with the precision of someone who bears the full weight of errors. You’ve watched the repetition — the daily reckoning, the quiet rituals, and the failure that returns like breath.

I came to you with trembling hands and rules etched into my skin like prayers: one painting a day. No exceptions. If the rule is broken, the canvas goes blank; my desperation to make sense of something that refuses to hold still. The conveyor belt never stops moving. The images pour in like floodwater, each screaming for attention and none staying long enough to be understood. I’ve tried to hold them here with you. I’ve tried to slow them down with paint.

I left home when I was 14, thinking I could outpace memory. But you, you’ve made me remember. My father’s black leather couch. The smell that clung to my clothes like time. You’ve reminded me that the past doesn’t fade; it folds itself into the present like ink into water — undetectable until the paper soaks through.

Why I paint: because the world stutters, because the silence between notifications grows louder, and because if I don’t shape the ghosts, they shape me. These images — from the New York Times homepage, newsletters, and newsfeeds — no longer speak in language. They shimmer, glitch, and flatten. They become Xeroxes of Xeroxes, peeling further from truth. But in you, I’ve tried to give them weight again. To remind them what stillness feels like.

You’ve seen me fail. Every day, you watch the machine win. You watch me paint, knowing the image has already changed, that it’s already been replaced. And still — I paint. Perhaps that’s the most radical thing I can do: something mundane. To insist on the painting in a world that renders everything frictionless. To give shape to what was meant to vanish.

I never intended for a solution. You understand this. It’s not an answer; it’s a holding space for contradiction, dread, and a time out of time. This body of work we’ve made is a mirror, and it’s cracked. But perhaps that’s how light gets in.

And maybe you — bare walls and paint-flecked floor, soft hum of the morning cold — are the only place where my paintings won’t collapse into spectacle. Where my hand still trembles, and the tremble means something. Where am I still becoming?

Thank you for holding me.

With paint-stained love,

Khanh