The Emperor’s Offsprings is a 10-piece installation whereby I invite viewers to examine how power has been practiced throughout the history of mankind — by means of transparency or obscurantism, enhancing bondage or liberty, war-making or peace-seeking, etc... These opposite properties are not always presented in a clear, unmovable and binary way, but as shifting contingencies, thus confounding 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 first century AD, those drums show carvings that depict plumaged people riding boats, hunting, cultivating rice – believed to be the early Vietnamese. As Vietnamese society morphed from a matriarchal community to a highly hierarchical patriarchal one, the drum’s function shifted from an instrument to call for communal gathering or for honoring the ancestors, to enforcing discipline and exhorting war.

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By manipulating the materials the drums are made of, and the space, sound and images embedded in them, I express the ramifications of power.

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Furthermore the metaphor of The Emperor’s Offsprings is intended to reflect on inheritance and complicity of the individual viewers — how each of us absorb, reproduce, or disrupt the systems of power woven around them. It challenges viewers to confront their own position within these dynamic fields, not as distant observers or victimized inheritors, but as active participants.

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Ultimately, the work resists simple resolution, instead opening a space to consider ethical action which cannot be renounced, even under severe constraint.