In this conceptual photographic performance series, I am attempting to capture the stillness of sleep amidst the hustle and bustle of life in Vietnam.  I am interested in the collapse between the private and public space through my documentation of people sleeping in public places in Vietnam.  By capturing the performance of the everyday, I am forced to contend with my own positionality as an American, a Westerner, a foreigner, even though I am part Vietnamese, as I engage with the social landscape of Vietnam.  Susan Sontag contends that, “photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”  In this performance series, I must repeatedly negotiate my own power and position the enables me to “take” these pictures, the subjects unaware and “powerless.”   In turn, I have to navigate my own relationship to Vietnam as an outsider.  
I am reminded that Vietnam, in the imagination of the American public and other westerners, exists merely as a war.  In Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag explores the role of memory in reading an image.  She states, “ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feeling.”  With respect to collective memory, the foreign gaze must reconcile the memory of war invoked through repeated images of still, lifeless Vietnamese people – resembling the dead, in the landscape of everyday contemporary Vietnam.
Each set of prints in the series is named after a street found in every city of Vietnam but also invokes the historical relationship to colonization and struggle for Vietnamese independence.