HELLO SOPHIE AND WELCOME BACK TO THE 4BYSIX FAMILY. THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO COLLABORATE WITH US ON OUR CURRENT VEHICLES FOR CHANGE INITIATIVE AND FOR SPEAKING WITH US ABOUT YOUR ART PRACTICE. 

TO START, CAN YOU TELL US HOW YOU INITIALLY APPROACHED THE BLEND BETWEEN YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE AND FICTIONAL SCENES? 

I blend these elements quite naturally, as this reflects my own way of perceiving the world and my own experience. I start with a concrete element, then translate it into symbols, signs, or visual structures. I don’t work with narrative in the sense that I would tell my story in an explicit or straightforward way. But there is a form of narrative in my paintings, I mea, the sense that something has happened, without it being shown or explained.

I like to leave this space open, so that the viewer can reconstruct the events in their own way.

WHAT IS YOUR PROCESS WHEN DECIDING WHAT TO REVEAL AND TRANSFORM INTO THE NARRATIVES DEPICTED IN YOUR PAINTINGS?

I’m not sure I’d say I consciously decide what I want to reveal. I think I’ve developed a symbolic language that comes naturally to me. That’s probably just how my mind works.

There are certain objects that keep reappearing in my paintings. A slice of strawberry toast, a watermelon, lychees, dates, a bottle of red wine… They all stem from a personal experience, often something very ordinary, even mundane. But by painting them over and over again, they become part of a personal alphabet. I don’t use them to literally illustrate memories. I return to them because they still carry within them something unfinished and alive in me. They allow me to speak of childhood, family, absence, or identity, without having to make anything explicit. So I think my process consists less of choosing what I will reveal than of letting certain forms return until they become a language.

AS YOU OFTEN SITUATE YOUR ILLUMINATED HORIZON LINE COMPOSITION AT SUNRISE OR SUNSET, WHAT DRAWS YOU TO THESE TRANSITIONAL MOMENTS WHEN STRUCTURING A PAINTING?

I often paint this precise moment, because it allows me to evoke both the passage of time and the changes taking place within us. What is happening is already, at the same time, beginning to fade away. And I try to make that visible… or at least perceptible. These moments also interest me greatly on a visual level. A sunrise and a sunset do not carry the same weight in terms of color or symbolic significance: they open up different chromatic regimes and different emotional temperatures.

It is never simply a beautiful sky. It is a precise temporality, a given state, a way of conveying that an image can contain both the beginning and the end, loss and possibility… all at once.

YOUR USE OF SYMBOLISM REFLECTS THEMES OF TRAUMA, RESILIENCE, AND HOPE. DO YOU FIND THAT CERTAIN ELEMENTS NATURALLY REAPPEAR MORE THAN OTHERS AS YOU EXPLORE THESE IDEAS? 

I think certain elements recur naturally, like a personal alphabet, as I’ve already mentioned. There are tables, horizons, curtains, fragments of text, eggs, fruit, bottles of wine, playing cards, and birds. They recur, but not in a rigid way. They can take on new meanings from one painting to the next. Most of them are connected to my own story. A watermelon, for example, refers to something related to childhood, hunger, arrival, and displacement. Swallows are linked to my Vietnamese first name, “Yen,” which means swallow; so when they appear in the sky, it’s like a subtle way of keeping that name alive.

What interests me is that these symbols can carry very different meanings at the same time. A bottle of red wine can be beautiful, luxurious, and deeply tied to French culture, but for me, it can also carry the memory of my father’s alcoholism. A landscape can give a sense of openness, but it can also evoke exile. The horizon can be synonymous with hope, but also with separation, and so on.

So I don’t really use symbols as a code that people have to decipher perfectly. I see them more as emotional archives. They allow me to evoke things I can’t always name directly. And perhaps that’s where resilience lies for me: in the fact that the figures always stand upright, facing the viewer, as if to say, “I exist, I’m still here, I won’t look away.” Hope shines through the color, the light, the horizons, the possibility of another place. But it’s never quite that simple: it’s always fragile and intertwined with something more uncertain.

YOU RECENTLY MADE A NEW PIECE FOR 4BYSIX’S CURRENT VEHICLES FOR CHANGE INITIATIVE. CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE WORK YOU HAVE MADE AND THE NARRATIVE YOU ARE CONVEYING?

This work explores the ambivalence of birth, beginnings, and dawn. I was intrigued by the idea that a new day can bring hope, but since it is always preceded by night, there is already this tension between renewal and rupture, between what is beginning and what is breaking apart.

The egg occupies a central place in the painting. For me, it evokes morning, childhood, and the beginning of life, but it is also cracked, the yolk oozing out almost like a wound. The strawberry toast carries a similar ambiguity: it is very domestic and familiar, but the red becomes almost blood-like, slightly unsettling.

The bust rests on a surface resembling terrazzo, which I perceive almost as a kind of domestic geology. It seems solid at first glance, but it floats above the water, making the entire composition unstable. There is this idea of drifting, of fragility, and of identity as something constructed from fragments.

It is also the first work in which I began to introduce different textural regimes, which will be more prominent in my next body of work. In this sense, the painting is both a small narrative about birth, rupture, and instability, and a formal starting point for what I am currently developing.

HAVING BEEN INTRODUCED TO AN UNCONVENTIONAL CANVAS LIKE LORRY TARPAULIN, DID ITS TEXTURE AND FEEL INFLUENCE YOUR TECHNIQUE OR THE WAY YOU APPROACHED THIS NEW PIECE?

The lorry tarpaulin was definitely a challenge because it’s not a surface one usually works with. I normally paint on linen and my painting is very much about smoothness and controlled surfaces. With this material, I had to prepare it differently. It needs to be sanded and properly primed so the oil paint can really adhere. I discovered that the drying time was also different from linen, slower so this painting required more patience. Plus the tarpaulin itself already had marks and irregularities. It wasn’t a perfectly smooth surface. So the real challenge was to find a way for the painting to follow those existing traces, and to make them feel integrated into the image. So yes, it influenced the work quite a lot. It pushed me to be less controlling in some areas and to let the material have its own presence inside the painting.

AS 4BYSIX’S MISSION INCLUDES ENCOURAGING THE USE OF REPURPOSED MATERIALS WITHIN THE ARTS AND THAT YOUR WORK OFTEN TRANSFORMS DIFFICULT REALITIES INTO SPACES OF RECOVERY, DOES THE ECOLOGICAL STATE OF THE NATURAL WORLD PLAY INTO YOUR PRACTICE AT ALL?

I wouldn’t say that my work has a direct ecological message. But the natural world is definitely present in my practice and plays a core role in my painting. I would say more through a poetic and emotional lens. I often use landscapes, water, skies and horizons to speak about the fragility of existence. 

However, as I am much concerned about the ecological state of the world, more concretely, in the studio, I try to reuse as much as I can: packaging, bubble wrap, tissue paper, plastic, containers, shipping materials. Even my cleaning rags are often old bedsheets from my family or friends. So there is a real attention to giving materials a second use.

LASTLY, HOW HAS LIFE IN THE STUDIO BEEN RECENTLY AND WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOU AND THE DIRECTION OF YOUR CREATIVE PRACTICE?

Life in the studio has been very intense lately and will remain so throughout the year. I’m developing a new series of works while preparing for my upcoming solo exhibition and an art fair in the United States scheduled for the end of the year. So I’m in this phase where everything feels very demanding and very alive. I’m painting a lot and thinking a lot about structure, space, objects, color…

I feel like my work is evolving toward more complex spaces where the body is still present, but more integrated into the painting’s architecture. I’m also introducing new material regimes, which is quite new for me. The paintings are becoming more physical, almost more geological.

What remains central is the dialectic between interior and exterior space, and the way memory, identity, time, and space can coexist within a single image.

This new series of works feels to me like both a continuation and a shift: more spatial, more layered, and more complex in terms of materials. I can’t wait to reveal it all!