Bright Water
A visual storytelling art book in which artworks come together to narrate their own stories.
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Bright Water is designed in an oversized 8.25" x 11" format, which I absolutely adore. Its bold, chunky layout evokes a childlike sense of wonder, reminding me of the magic of opening a book for the very first time.
Bright Water is an illustrated modern fairy tale, a mythopoetic, autofictional narrative. It is an early experiment in poetic prose by me, a trans woman visual artist from the Tày tribe. Part spirit memoir, part origin myth, Bright Water weaves personal, ancestral, and imagined histories through my queer and indigenous lens.
The book is illustrated with the first of my off-the-canvas works, spanning ceramics, textiles, and sculpture. Creating these pieces was an early effort to build a new material culture for myself, one inspired by the traditions I’ve observed in my tribe but reimagined using modern synthetic materials instead of those drawn from the natural world. After photographing the real-world works, I further deconstructed some images, digitally collaging them into entirely new, on-the-page works. I constantly reuse my own work to generate new ideas, because I am an absorbent vessel able to observe, absorb, and transform reality anew. The world, in all its wonder, can shift my mindset and even reshape my physical body. But I, too, can shape it through art that occupies real space and art that reassigns meaning to the spaces I inhabit.
Though conceived early, this project is by no means premature. It forms a vital foundation, a sturdy, all-possible playground for future sculptural explorations, where I can work more freely, more messily, and more expansively with materials and forms. Bright Water is also a marker in my personal history—something for my inner child to look back on when I’m further along in my journey, with, I hope, larger and more influential sculptural works behind me.
Last but not least, I offer this book to all who wish to inquire more about why I create the work I do, both on and off the canvas. This is the story of my art’s origin. Let us connect more intimately beyond the gallery walls, within the quiet, unfolding pages of this book.
What does Bright Water mean?
Bright Water is a visual storytelling project where artworks serve as backgrounds, characters, and objects. Bright Water is also an artwork in itself, exploring scale and staging through the mediums of print and photography to tell cryptic, open-ended narratives across three off-the-canvas bodies of work: Cinderella Far East, Virgin Mermaid, and QUAI THAI. Yet to me, Bright Water is the journey of a mermaid defying currents and streams, only to discover she was not born of the ocean but from the craters of mountains and sky. Among my art, I remember: Bright Water is my salvaged stream of consciousness, the river of thoughts within me, and the meaning of my name, Hà Minh.