I wake up every morning with the certain familiarity of the scent of burning incense. My formative years unfolded between two homes—my mother’s and my father’s. Home becomes a series of moments that feel certain and familiar—as if I’ve fabricated memories just to have something I could hold onto.
Home is not embedded in a certain place or time, but in the consistency of temporal experience.
When I think of home, my mind drifts towards the clutter in my mother’s red cupboard — dense collective of artefacts, tracing who we are and where we’ve been. The old photo, toy from a loved one, or a drawing from school all serve to actualise some repressed memory of my mother or father. The clutter holds unconscious portals—gateways to selves that I no longer am yet still cling on in quiet moments of becoming.
My identity cannot exist without the echoes of who I’ve been. It is not singular, but a collection of borrowed roots that connect my parents, my culture, my people to me. In that entanglement, a collective identity emerges, weaving my sense of home into a wider ecological stratum—the architect of belonging.
Home is neither here nor there, but in the threads of love, memory, and sacrifice that bind scattered fragments of belonging into something whole.
The red cupboard is also my mother’s shrine where my mother prays every morning. It sits in the corner of our living room, on the warm pine floorboards aside the couch that my brothers and I would gather to watch TV in the evenings while my mother cooked us dinner.
We arrive at the found belongings of my mother’s shrine—an amalgam of contradictions. Spiritually revered, yet spatially ordinary; tucked into the corner, yet always present in the room. It is hatted with Buddhist relics while its body overflows with the memorabilia of our journeys —photos, souvenirs, medals.
The shrine is an object of certainty for me – certainty in its sense of familiarity and certainty that it embodies who I believe I am and was. In this connection, there is no single consistency—only a sense of self shaped through dependencies.
My father also has a shrine. He also prays to begin his day.
My mother and father pray for the togetherness and prosperity of our family. Our parents had separated but our family had not – the value of the family usurping the traditionalist Buddhist ideals. It is the doctrine of our Vietnamese culture, the doctrine of Vietnamese people, the doctrine of our parents.
My mother and father pray for the togetherness and prosperity of our family. Though they had parted, our family never fractured—the value of kinship rising above the bounds of traditional Buddhist ideals. It is the quiet doctrine of our Vietnamese heritage, Vietnamese people, the enduring belief of our parents – the essence of our family and who we are that is at the centre of it all.
Despite differences in location, such a mutual ritual cast a thread of commonality that entangles seemingly irreconcilable homes.
I created the Object.
The Object is composed of two half-pipes that do not meet coherently. The pieces are intentionally offset and suggest alignment, yet you will find that it is never achieved. The suggested form has a clean and ordered externality, while the internal face is more gestural of artefactual chaos. The clay is imprinted with the arboreal sculpture of my father and smothered with the unburnt incense of my mother. At a certain moment, it is fixed, and the illusion of control slips beyond reach.
Disparate elements are unified by a chaotic moment—a simultaneous burn. Childhood memories, those shared familiarities strung between my mother and father, are resurrected —in touch, sight, and smell of the burn. In that unifying chaos, the unsteady home remerges through lingering ephemeral traces of soot and smoke – binding the Object in matrimonial continuity.
There is an apparent story that can be negotiated through the tessellation of scorch marks that resemble an event gone by. In that moment, the Object’s divided form dissolves.
It is a conscious object that serves to actualise embedded memory. A medal of a childhood success. A photo of a past holiday.
The clay has caught the smoke, layered with the soot. As those come to physically interrogate the duality of the object, they will remark on the soot—only to have the soot remark them.
The Object temporarily catches the familiar fragments of my fractured identities. Caught by fire, it seizes those fleeting memories of a home unbound by place—rediscovered in quiet moments, when the fallibility of memory can no longer be denied.
The Object captures the memory of home—manifested through the lingering soot marks embedded by chaos. Clay limbs try to capture smoke with bare hands – an act illogical, yet made real through temporal scents, lingering touches, and tender reminders of culinary warmth, spiritual aromas, and memories between.
Perhaps my apparent irreconcilability, mirrored in the object’s duality, is merely my own reservations. The weight of my expectations has only delayed the coming together of my whole self.
I am still a boy in a Vietnamese family. The son of two parents trying their best to retain culture and provide for their family.
My fractured identity, caught between two paradigms, suddenly feels less invalid—not in isolation, but in the necessary dependence on both. The red of the shrine, the smother of smoke, the spare incense sticks are simply the commonalities between two distant homes, evoking fragrant memories of selfhood and scattered culture.
The distinct red embodies my parents’ common thread of love, sacrifice, and effort.
As the string is tied, two halves suddenly become coherent and unionised. The tendencies to divide my own identity seem to fade away into the broader attention of my ever-present love for my mother and father.
Only in a quiet room, steeped in gratitude does a clear sense of who I am, who I was, and where I belong become clear.
This excerpt is taken from a larger work titled Vestiges by Blaze Pham. The artwork was displayed at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura. Minor editorial adjustments have been made to suit the blog format while keeping the original voice and tone of the piece.
Lien Pham 