Re-emerging and Remembering with Nhu Xuan Hua’s New Book, “Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory”

When I first met Nhu Xuan Hua in 2017, we immediately clicked. I was working on the first volume of FAR–NEAR, and our conversation over coffee stirred and expanded my own internal thoughts on identity and the difficulty of navigating intergenerational family relationships. We spoke about the effects of trauma on the way our parents and grandparents shared or withheld their own stories, on the desire of learning more about ourselves through them. We touched upon their particular way of expressing affection, which could sometimes hit too hard and cause greater distance even if it was coming from a place of love.

A few months later, she sent me early versions of a project she was working on. It was a series of  digitally manipulated archival images that obscured the person or people in the photograph, in turn obscuring the memory and offering new interpretations of the context in which they were taken.

Nhu Xuan titles the series Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory. It utilizes the word, “tropism,” which is a biological phenomenon that indicates growth or turning movement of an organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus. For Nhu Xuan, the word encapsulates these visual memories that don’t belong directly to her but to her family, and thus to her personal history.

We are proud to have published Nhu Xuan’s project in Vol. One, when it was still in its early development. Last September, Area Books published Tropism in its complete form. A “treasure hunt on paper, [Tropism maps] a route connecting past and present. Places and people merge: he, she, they, here, there become one after having been separate for so long. In this imaginary bi-dimensional city, the elements from the photographs walk around, meet, dance, multiply, dissipate, transform, lose themselves and disappear – leaving behind them the mere and haunting presence of nostalgia.”

Below, Nhu Xuan Hua offers FAR–NEAR readers a glimpse into the book and the letter that accompanies it.