In [ ] Translation

In [ ] Translation / Trong khoảng trôi bềnh bồng begins with a simple belief: graphic design is, at its core, an act of translation. It carries meaning across language, image, material, interface, and use. This exhibition brings together editorial, branding, typography, UX/UI, augmented reality, motion, and object-based work that each return to the same impulse, to translate. Across books, posters, cards, screens, packaging, games, and physical objects, the work follows how meaning shifts as it moves through form, context, and experience. 

The projects are connected through what they try to carry across. A thousand-year cultural practice is reintroduced for people living far from it, under the pressure of distance and possible erasure. Complex legal and institutional processes are reshaped into guidance that feels clearer and more usable, shaped around where someone is on their journey. Words that resist direct translation are approached through motion, interaction, and sensory form, in an effort to carry more of what they mean. Elsewhere, visual history becomes type design, play becomes a physical system, and familiarity becomes branding. Across the exhibition, translation becomes both the method and the reason for making. 

Trong khoảng trôi bềnh bồng sits alongside the English title without directly resolving it. The phrase carries a drifting, suspended quality that stays partly its own. The word bềnh bồng is especially important here. In linguistic terms, it sits close to an ideophone, a word that evokes sensation and image through sound and rhythm. More simply, it feels like the motion it describes. That quality stays close to how I think about graphic design. Meaning does not always arrive through definition alone. Sometimes it moves through sequence, touch, pacing, image, and use. 

This body of work comes from a long familiarity with uncertainty and from trying to make and create under those conditions anyway. Some pieces are meant to be read closely. Some are handled, turned over, scanned, or viewed through a screen. That interaction matters. It shapes how meaning is carried and received. For me, graphic design matters because it can hold what does not settle easily into words. It can make room for memory, access, use, and feelings to exist in the same form. What I am after is not a perfect translation, but a structure that can carry what matters and keep it in view.