Drawing on passages from Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Le creates an ode to loss, struggle, and the experience of growing up Vietnamese American in the United States. The series Vernacular of Silence brings together prose, poetry, and family snapshots to capture the intimacies of everyday life while documenting overlooked narratives within social and photographic histories. Here, silence emerges through language, as untold and repeated stories unravel, fold back upon themselves, and dissolve into images through illegible text. The text becomes a portal, bridging fragmented memories and a persistent sense of searching. Meanwhile, the foliage evokes a rừng—a disorienting, imagined jungle space where memory, identity, and illusion intertwine.

I think I was drowning, archival print 22"x30", photo vinyl 35"x50" 2023

What we before we were we, archival print 22"x30", photo vinyl 35"x50" 2023

I can’t tell you why the dead outnumber the living, archival print 22"x30", photo vinyl 35"x50" 2023

Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence, archival print 22"x30", photo vinyl 35"x50" 2023

There was a war, we came from its epicenter, archival print 22"x30", photo vinyl 35"x50" 2023