A Stitch in Time: Preserving Vietnamese Intangible Heritages through Traditional Hand Embroidery

By Nhan Phan

As a child of diaspora, it is difficult for me to define home. I don’t fit in the U.S. because its culture is different from the one in my home, nor was I completely raised with Vietnamese cultural values. Sometimes, I felt like a pappus-clad, floating, and lost in the wind between two cultures. As a 1.5-generation Vietnamese-American, the exploration of my identity and culture has always played an important role in my art. Mentally, I am living between two cultures, yet I often feel I cannot lay claim to either. Living in the United States, I sometimes feel disconnected from my Vietnamese culture, and when I return to Vietnam, I witness the degradation of the traditional and cultural appreciation I hold to be important. In my work, I aim to uphold what is being lost with change in Vietnam and I look to preserve the intangible cultural heritages, and the textile cultural heritages that lay the foundation of Vietnamese cultural identity. With the departure of elders within communities, I grasp at the loss of the traditional moral and cultural knowledge values that they hold. Just as I am living in a cross-cultural mindset, my embroidery experiences the same. My training in Western embroidery skills is applied to my Vietnamese inspired themes, where it is used to uphold, and stimulate dialogues to better understand of the teaching of Vietnamese cultural and moral values.  An exploration of these qualities is reflected in my artwork, and I hope it is key to understanding my cross-cultural identity.

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