The Emperor's Children

          (upcoming)

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The Emperor’s Children examines the different decisions individuals make while navigating systems of power. It explores how authority is practiced— through transparency or obscurantism, enhancing bondage or liberty, war-making or peace-seeking. These oppositions are not presented as fixed binaries, but as shifting conditions that shape human behavior and moral judgment.

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As a symbol of power, I employ the figure of the ancient bronze drum of Vietnam. Excavated in great number in Northern Vietnam and dated from the period of the first century AD, those drums show carvings that depict plumaged people riding boats, hunting, cultivating rice – believed to be the primitive Vietnamese. As Vietnamese society morphed from a matrimonial community to a highly hierarchical patrimonial one, the drum took the function from calling for communal gathering or communication with the ancestors, to exhorting for discipline and war.

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By invoking the metaphor of “the emperor’s children,” the project reflects on complicity and inheritance—how individuals absorb, reproduce, or disrupt the power they are born into. It invites viewers to confront their own position within these dynamics, not as distant observers or victimized inheritors, but as active participants. Ultimately, the work resists simple resolution, instead opening a space to consider how ethical agency persists, even under constraint.

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