HANOI, VIETNAM City and Memory

Hanoi is a big city in which there are small urban areas, it’s like city upon city, the latest covering up the earliest, the urban areas are vanishing into the past, vanishing with nostalgia along with the roads, streets, and markets that already have new names. Memories of the city keep vanishing with time, with the flood of people immigrating tirelessly into this city.
A city might lose its memory or perhaps it doesn’t have any memory at all. If it is not because of the war, it mostly comes from the inhumane urban planning which has led to the breakdown of memory. The cities are bigger and bigger, the roads are wider and wider and the pavements are further and further from each other. There are more and more inhumane planning ratios and they have pushed people apart from one other.
Perhaps, we should measure the humanity ratio of the city by the steps of people, by the shadows in public spaces that make people move closer to each other and have more interaction with one another.
Hanoi once had perfect ratios of a humane urban life like that, but in recent years, urban planning is moving in a different direction that creates more and more soulless blocks of concrete and it is breaking the humanity ratio that we previously had. Moreover, it is breaking the memory spaces of the city.
This exhibition is a collection of efforts in the journey to seek and save pieces and pieces of our city memory through my visual art projects, with the purpose of stimulating the audience to raise questions about the value of the memory of the imaginary city in our near future.