Antonius-Tín Bui and David Antonio Cruz in Conversation
Antonius Bui was the first artist whose studio I visited when things slowly started opening up. Although we had done talks together, chatted on the phone, and showed our work in the same exhibition (The National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 2019), this was the first time we had seen each other in person. Antonius was one of the first people I hugged after a year of social distancing and remote contact.
Antonius’s work has beautiful fragility and resilience; each cut carves out a history, a place, and a story exposing a network of support ligaments, stretching across the paper, mapping out intimate living spaces, patterns, words, Asian motifs, and vases that frame the subjects.
Our conversation left me with a range of personal memories, reflections on rituals, and shared resonances.
I was reminded of how I learned at an early age the need to hide or disguise my pitch and gestures, needs, and truth. Like Antonius, who is the child of Vietnamese immigrants, I am a child of parents that migrated from the island of Puerto Rico. They built mental walls to keep the American identity, customs, rituals, and culture outside of our doors. Love was expressed through weekly visits to my grandparents and large dinner spreads, but desire was never allowed to enter the front door. Occasionally, I pranced around with a towel on my head, swinging my head around—we had a good laugh, but we weren’t allowed to name the thing that we knew lived within me.
But I dreamed up a world where everyone was cute, warm, loving, safe. I spent my early years drawing that world—mapping it out, coding it on paper. There was always paper lying around. It could be folded and set to the wind, you could make cranes, share notes, tell stories, document history. You could crumble, erase, and start again. So fragile yet resilient. Every interlocking fiber maintained the shape, form, and burden of the stories written on it.
How do we remember, honor, celebrate life, our relationships, connections, our loved ones? We burn candles, sage, scribble their names on paper, cook their favorite foods. We play their songs, carry charms with their pic- tures, tattoo their faces and names on our arms, name our children after our ancestors, and present flowers, fruits, and incense for them. We dress them in the finest clothes.
We burn Joss papers, a ritual offering of money and wealth to the dead, which is most popular during death anniversaries, Tet, and the ghost month festival. We tell stories, write stories, draw on paper, and shape images on folded paper. We burn the names, papers, stories, drawings, sending them to the air, transcending this space, and collapsing memories, the possibilities of the future and possibilities of an unlived life.
How do we carve a space, make room for us, and still have space for the nuances? We bring the fire, darling — bring the fire.
David Antonio Cruz: How does your approach to the work begin? Do you sketch everything out before you begin cutting? Are you following specific motifs or is the process somewhat intuitive?
Antonius Bui: I start by sketching out the body, almost like a blind contour drawing, responding with the backgrounds, and adding elements such as vessels, picture frames, or furniture. Often, I already know certain elements I want to include because they mean a lot to the subject being portrayed; one is always reacting to another. It truly is a nonlinear dance. Sometimes I project an image of a vessel, sometimes I use preexisting cut pieces, and I trace them on. Then the patterns will overlay certain bodies and body parts, and as I cut them, I decide where to highlight certain elements more and when to overlap them. I am really interested in slippage and allowing boundaries to melt into each other. It’s a very intensive drawing process, yet in the final image all that remains of that process is the faint glow of the color pencil on the reversed side, reflected onto the wall.
DAC: It is, like etching, scratching away, removing. You treat the vessels just as you treat the bodies.
AB: During COVID, when we didn’t have access to museums and galleries — many were making their archives available online. I started rummaging through their collections in search of Asian art, specifically Vietnamese art, and was immediately confronted by their focus on our connection to porcelain vessels or ceramics in gen- eral – we are constantly denied the right to embodiment and self-determination, our own humanity and body, simply objectified.
DAC: There is a way that certain institutions erase our cultural narratives, the links between the present and the past. But one cannot exist without the other, they collapse onto each other to exist.
AB: Precisely, and that’s why our work is so important. They provide counternarratives to these very reductive histories, and provide us space to heal from the traumas caused by being denied our own agency. When your cultural narratives are constantly erased and siloed into an Orientalist past, it does a lot of harm to one’s imagination.
DAC: Do you think of your process as taking away, exposing, or are you adding?
AB: The act of cutting can be so violent, but my process is one of transcendence. Yes, we as Queer and Trans people of color have endured a lot of scars, oppression, and injustice, and continue to, but we refuse to be solely define by that. I’m carving away at a white canvas to reveal the beauty, divinity, and resilience of those around me.
DAC: It’s the scars. The scars...Are they all couples in this body of work?
AB: All the large-scale works present a pairing of some sort. Many are couples, some are chosen family members, collaborators, and one shows a father and son relationship. There’s a sense of intimacy, tenderness, and quiet power... gestures of affection and trust.. A side we don’t always get to see, especially in most narratives of Asian Pacific Islander American families and bonds.
DAC: I love how you chose the couples, to frame love this way. What is it about each pairing that you wanted to focus on?
AB: I associate certain people with distinct patterns, flora, and fauna, specific to their unique narratives—their own history or my relationship with them. Even though the portraits are of particular people, I hope that viewers can relate to the urgency of intimacy, compassion, and softness regardless. The focus is on actually being pres- ent for and with one another, redefining our relationships as we navigate these transitional times.
