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 mess. 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.

That changed when I found Giao.

It started with their collaborations on the Menta and Bro projects. I wasn’t drawn in by the final visuals. It was the process that caught me. The way each layer revealed something deeper. How uncertainty wasn’t hidden, but honored. How the work felt alive, like it was listening while it was being made.

For the first time, I saw art not as decoration but as communication. Not as output, but as conversation.

That’s when it clicked. What Giao was doing wasn’t so different from what I do with data. When I build a dashboard or model, it goes through the same arc. Cleaning. Structuring. Visualizing. If I do it well, it doesn’t just show information. It speaks. It connects.

Giao made that connection visible. It reframed my work. I wasn’t just assembling charts. I was crafting experiences. Designing for understanding. Designing for feeling.

Now, I ask different questions. When I present a financial forecast or a predictive model, I think about the person on the other side. Can they follow the rhythm? Can they trust the logic? Will it guide them, or lose them? What is the story this is trying to tell?

To me, Giao is not just a philosophy of art. It’s a way of designing with empathy. A method that treats process as dialogue. A mindset that brings human care into systems thinking.

I used to think art had nothing to do with my life. But Giao showed me it was always there. Not in galleries or museums. But in lines of code. In decisions I make to clarify, to frame, to connect.

All it took was learning how to see.