Thúng chài (basket boat)—once an essential lifeline of coastal families—now drifts in existential waters, suspended between obsolescence and staged tourism.

 

During my decade in Vietnam, I witnessed how modernization uplifted daily life even as it eroded the colors of many worlds into a single tone of progress. What was lost was never merely an artifact. Within each boat cradles an entire cosmology of wisdom—a living dialogue between human and ocean, between craft and ecology, between survival and spirit.

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To weave a thúng chài is to enter a rhythm older than language. Each strip of bamboo holds the memory of tide and wind, bent and sealed through the patience of hands that have learned to listen to the material. The thúng chài is not simply a vessel of transport—it is a vessel of relationships between land and its people. It embodies an ontology of interdependence, where human ingenuity arises not against nature but with it. This is, to me, technology (techne + logos) in its pure form. 

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Ironically, our fates might be more intertwined than we could imagine - will we too, one day, become artefacts of our own progress? What happens when the living knowledge embedded in our hands and rituals is replaced by abstraction, efficiency, and speed?

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As an artist, my first act begins with invocation: a calling forth of memory and meaning. How do we re-member—like Isis stitching Osiris back together—the fragmented body of our relationship with the living world? How can art become an act of repair, where the making of form rekindles the meaning behind matter? For me, “living art” is not representation but participation. It is an ecology of attention that allows objects to speak again, to breathe through us.

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My second act lies in the 7,600-mile journey from Phú Yên to Black Rock City. This carbon-laden passage bears a heavy paradox that only the lightness of dream can resolve. What if it were the basket’s dream to come to the desert—to return not to sea, but to its dreaming? A beautiful image stood out for me: the Black Rock desert, once an ancient seabed, now an infertile womb. A womb so sensitive to any memory of life, that it becomes a portal, once a year, during Burning Man. In that brief window, the desert  is filled with people, art, movement, and sound—a tide of human presence flooding the void. For a moment, the barren becomes fertile again, not with water, but with imagination - the world of dreams past, present and future.

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With Axis Mundi as 2026's theme, it was the perfect backdrop to invite 80,000 souls into a collective dreaming—a liminal space between worlds remembered and forgotten.

 

We remember that progress without soul is akin to death.

We reclaim our inheritance not by preserving it behind glass, but to keep them alive through relationship, ritual, and play.

We reweave fractured worlds not through heroic activism and rhetoric, but through the sharing of tales and the singing of forgotten songs.

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Perhaps if we ride in these boats long enough, listen to the fishermen’s songs, and cast the nets....when the dancing turns to dust and night awakens to dawn, the dream and dreamer will become one and remembered through new meaning.