Anna

Journeys

It all begins at the dawn of my seventeenth year, in Vietnam. I dreamed of buildings and architecture, but fate — in the quiet irony of a few missing points in mathematics — decided otherwise. That shortfall was not an ending, but an opening: the start of an infinite freedom in which rigid lines loosen, soften, and come together to give birth to colour.

I began to paint by instinct, the way one breathes, guided by nothing but the wish to wrestle with the canvas. It was only once I set foot on French soil that my painting found its anchor, gradually freeing itself from a constrained realism — even if my earliest brushstrokes already favoured spontaneity over the rigour of convention.

But life is a constant shedding of skin. The real turning point came in the suspended silence of the world, during the pandemic. In the quiet of a living room, at my friend Francis's — my refuge for daydreaming — I crossed the threshold into abstraction. I freed myself from an already-reimagined reality to try what lies beyond: the temptation of pure emotion.

Ann'art is the fruit of that inward journey.