BETWEEN MEMORY EXHIBITION, 2023

Common Wealth Gallery, Madison Wisconsin

Làm Giấy (papermaking)

giấy (handmade paper), mulberry, hemp, dust, hair, bark

2023 

Papermaking in Vietnam is an ancient craft, spanning seventeen centuries. Its significance in Vietnam is a cultural craft that carries what we see in each handmade sheet: air, earth, water, movement, and people. Today, hand papermaking traditions are continually threatened in Vietnam. Rapid industrialization, years of colonization, and the extent of multiple consecutive wars have rendered this seventeen-century craft nearly extinct.

On display, Làm Giấy, is an installation to celebrate each handmade giấy using traditional Vietnamese papermaking equipment to form each sheet: liềm seo (bamboo woven screen) and khung seo (wooden frame). The pine-needle brush on display, chổi lá thông in Vietnamese, was used to brush up each sheet, row by row. Accompanying the installation is a collaborative soundscape with composer, Denise Mei Yan Hofmann. The soundscape highlights the process of papermaking, collected stories from Vietnamese papermakers, and personal narrative as an audible form. As you listen to the soundscape, the piece captures the importance of papermaking as an act of community, culture, identity, and place. Through accumulation and process, we can materialize the importance of giấy and the memory in which it lives.