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.