Where I Come From, Blending Was Normal

I grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, where French balconies overlooked street vendors crouched on iconic red and blue plastic stools. Catholic churches shared the skyline with Buddhist temples. Colonial post offices faced shopping malls with digital billboards. Chanel boutiques stood just down the block from smoky charcoal grills and plastic tables sticky with fish sauce. None of it felt curated. No one called it fusion. It just existed. Not as contrast, but as rhythm. It didn’t need to explain itself. It just worked. That was my first education in coexistence. I didn’t have a word for it, but it became a way of seeing.

Dislocation Was My Teacher

When I moved to the U.S., that rhythm fell apart. I stopped blending in. I became the difference. Vietnamese. International. Other. But belonging came in fragments. I lived with a host family in South Carolina who treated me like their own. I watched college football I didn’t understand. I joined rivalries I didn’t grow up with. We said grace before meals, and I called them Mom and Dad. That didn’t erase the distance, but it softened it. It taught me that closeness didn’t always require fluency. That even partial connection can be enough to feel held.

Naming the Feeling

Years later, in an art history class, I studied Gandharan sculpture. Buddhist icons carved with Greek features. Draped in togas. Poised in contrapposto. I stopped. That was it. I had seen this before. Then came Phat Diem Cathedral. A Catholic church in Vietnam built in the form of a traditional pagoda. Wooden beams and tile roofs surrounding a marble altar. No collision. No contradiction. Just form meeting form. Just two systems living in the same space.

That’s when the word came. Giao.

From Recognition to Practice

Giao means intersection. But to me, it became more than a word. It became method. A way to approach complexity without reducing it. A way to design that listens before it answers. It changed how I made things. I stopped treating design as a fixed outcome. I started treating it as a response. Something shaped by context, conversation, and co-creation. Giao taught me to stay open. To hold tension. To design not for resolution, but for relationship.

QART

QART didn’t begin as a business plan. It came from living inside Giao for long enough that it had to take shape. A studio that works with brands and people who move between contexts. Heritage and ambition. Memory and change.

We don’t simplify identities. We build systems that hold them. We design in the in-between. Between tradition and strategy. Between aesthetics and ethics. Between where you come from and where you’re going.

I didn’t grow up with art in the way most people imagine. I studied instruments. I went to an art school. But art never felt like it was mine. It stayed at a distance. Abstract. Decorative. A kind of background noise.

My world was numbers. Logic. Clean dashboards. I trained myself to bring order to chaos. To transform raw data into patterns people could understand. That kind of clarity was satisfying. But over time, something about it felt incomplete. Like the story was too clean. Too quiet.

As a kid, I loved puzzles. I liked knowing when things fit. When a number balanced. When a rule held. In college, that turned into an obsession with systems - how things could be structured to function, to scale, to deliver insight. I studied business intelligence, built predictive models, and spent hours refining visualizations that could turn noise into signal. I learned how to measure everything, and how to remove everything that couldn’t be measured.

That worked. Until it didn’t.

That changed when I discovered Giao.

I came across Giao through two projects: Menta and Bro. What caught me wasn’t the final design or the surface aesthetic. It was the process behind the work. The layers of decisions. The unfinished edges. The willingness to show what was still becoming. There was a kind of honesty in it. A sense that the work was listening, not just speaking.

For the first time, I saw art not as decoration but as communication. Not as outcome, but as dialogue.

That’s when it clicked. What Giao explored through design was not far from what I do with data. When I build a dashboard or model, it moves through its own arc. Cleaning. Structuring. Visualizing. If I do it well, it doesn’t just present information. It communicates. It resonates.

Before Giao, I saw my work as purely functional. Charts existed to perform. But afterwards, I started to notice how much of my work was emotional. A forecast isn’t useful if it overwhelms. A report isn’t successful if no one trusts it. Every dataset is trying to say something. My job is to help it say it well.

That reframing changed how I worked.

Now, when I design a system or visualization, I ask different questions. Who is going to see this first? Where will their eyes land? Will the rhythm feel intuitive? Can they follow the logic without getting lost? Does it guide them? Does it respect them?

I think about empathy and logic as one task. I think about space, silence, and sequence. I think about what it means to design something that helps people feel less confused, less overwhelmed, more understood.

One of the first times I applied this mindset was in a project for a startup’s finance team. I had already built a reporting tool - projected runway, burn rate, cash flow pacing. It was all accurate. But something about it felt… sharp. Flat. Cold. I reworked the layout. Reduced noise. Reordered insights to follow a more natural progression. I gave the interface space to breathe, and used language that acknowledged ambiguity instead of pretending it wasn’t there.

When I presented it, the feedback wasn’t about the numbers. It was about the feeling.
“It’s easier to trust.”
“It’s less intimidating.”
“This makes me want to keep looking.”

That’s what Giao gave me. A new lens for the work I already do. A way of seeing that includes care.

Giao didn’t make me an artist. It helped me realize I already was one.

I used to think art had nothing to do with my life. But Giao showed me it was always there. Not in galleries. Not in museums. But in the code I write. In the models I build. In the questions I ask. In the way I try to bring meaning into view.

All it took was learning how to see.

A Return, Not an Exhibition

I didn’t plan for Phat Diem to be shown in the cathedral it was named after. I made it in Providence, RI, working in silence, carrying images from a trip I had taken months earlier. I had walked through the cathedral as a visitor then - measuring, sketching, recording. Not with a show in mind, but with questions. Quiet ones. Questions about place, identity, authorship.

When the work returned to that cathedral, it wasn’t a display. It was a return to the source of the question.

A Work Made of Opposites

Phat Diem is a two-part drawing. Charcoal, ink, and gold leaf - three materials chosen not for style but for meaning. Charcoal for what is temporary. Ink for what is stable. Gold leaf for what is sacred.

The first panel shows the exterior of the cathedral. It’s drawn from below, with a compressed perspective that pushes the viewer’s gaze upward. The composition is heavy at the bottom, but the top is all white space - an open field of nothingness that refuses to resolve. You have to step closer. You have to tilt your head. It doesn’t present. It invites.

The second panel is the opposite. The interior corridor of the cathedral is rendered in full depth - dark, narrow, unambiguous. You aren’t invited. You’re directed. The hallway leads straight toward a gold altar. No negative space. No ambiguity. You are inside the ritual now, and it moves you forward whether you’re ready or not.

Architecture, Material, and Memory

The contradiction is everywhere. The building is Catholic in function, but Buddhist in form. The altar shines in gold, but the walls are covered in ink and soot. The viewer is allowed to stand freely between the two panels, but cannot avoid being pulled by their direction.

This wasn’t accidental. It was how I experienced the space. First from outside - curious, open, unthreatened. Then inside - suddenly conscious of hierarchy, formality, tradition I didn’t fully understand.

I didn’t paint this to teach. I painted it to record. Not what I saw, but what I felt. Confusion. Reverence. Distance. And a kind of recognition that didn’t need language.

The Day It Came Back

When I brought the work back to the cathedral, I expected formality. Instead, I was met with quiet warmth. We hung the pieces without ceremony. Just two panels, quietly resting against the walls that had shaped them.

Visitors passed. Some looked. Some didn’t. One older man paused for a long time, hands behind his back, saying nothing. That was enough. The work wasn’t asking for attention. It was making space.

In that moment, I knew: the work wasn’t made for this cathedral. It was made because of it. And it wasn’t complete until it came back.

Not an Answer, but a Frame

I didn’t create Phat Diem as a major work. I made it while trying to answer smaller, quieter questions. It came after a trip through Hue and Ninh Binh, during a time when I was searching for something I couldn’t yet name. Each panel was an attempt - not to explain, but to hold the questions I was already living with:

Where am I standing?
Who am I between these layers of identity?
Am I charcoal, soft, erasable? Or gold, fixed, absolute?
What does it mean to create when you’re still unsure where you belong?

These drawings didn’t answer those questions. They held them. And they gave others a place to ask their own.

If someone stands between those two panels and feels the urge to ask something of themselves, that’s enough. That’s what the work is for.

What Giao Looks Like in Practice

Before this trip, Giao was an idea. A method. A framework I wrote about. But here, it became embodied. Giao is not just a concept of blending or coexistence. It’s a practice of returning. Of allowing contradictions to share space without forcing them into harmony.

Giao is what happens when something made from memory finds its way back to origin. Not to be approved. But to be recognized.

The Work Continues

I used to think completion happened when the last mark dried. When the surface was resolved. Now I know some works are only finished when they return. When they re-enter the place that shaped their beginning.

Phat Diem didn’t end when I signed my name. It ended when it met the space that made it possible. Or maybe it didn’t end at all.

Maybe it just entered its next phase.