Writing has always been a primary mode of existence for me, but also for my art. This hybrid work is a documentation of my love for the nuptial tissue between text and the visual.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water, with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.

Find this work and more in A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection, a joint publication of De-Canon & Fonograf Editions.

Artist Reflection

Early in the summer of ____, as I was putting together my memoir, Country in a Glass of Water, I was inspired to create a visual version of the memoir, one that spoke more versatilely and more polychromatically to my immigrant, refugee, and diasporic experiences. After my open-heart surgery in 2019, I exist and continue to exist in a debilitating state of chronic pain. To cope with this pain, I began to draw on a regular basis. I drew vegetable and fruit dykes and all sorts of visual objects, objects such as hearts and a toilet and brains and a baseball and fish and scissors. But then the pen grew difficult; whenever I drew (shading its dense black ink in), the intense pressure of pressing the pen nibs on the page placed so much strain on my post-operated heart. I had to turn to a medium that was gentler on my body while maintaining my natural compulsion for prolificness. 

Watercolor is gentle and tender. Their brushes are light. Their colors—rich and versatile—are light. I started a project called “The Boat People Series” to address my Vietnamese refugee experiences. Employing watercolors to portray boats proved incredibly fitting, evoking a poignant sense of diasporic poetry and appositeness. The very act of working with water, or “nước,” instilled in me a profound connection to Vietnam, effectively conveying a feeling of “birthnướcing.” It’s worth noting that “nước”means not just water but also the materiality of homeland in Vietnamese. Writing has always been a primary mode of existence for me, but also for my art. This hybrid work is a documentation of my love for the nuptial tissue between text and the visual. The text elements, serving both as content and texture, were sourced from my father’s archive, which contains documents related to our family’s entry into the United States through the refugee relocation program several decades ago.