Dear Home

Dear Home

Kien Hoang

MFA Digital Animation and Interactive Media, 2018

 

Abstract:

I grew up in Hanoi, Vietnam. The city has witnessed, through its past pervaded with wars and destruction, many chapters of re-making and re-identifying the city by drawing from its heritage and adapting modernization. As a 90s kid, I grew up in a crucial time as the city began to transition from communism toward capitalism. While assimilating and adapting to new sociopolitical conditions, the people have shown a strong attachment to traditions in the way they organize their habitat by restructuring their surroundings to appear closer to the desired living state. This project reimagines, via the unique lens of computer animation, a specific part of the city, the communal housing community of Hanoi. As a spatial narrative, the film invites the audience to become a dweller in a communal apartment as it comes to life with movements and to witness the confrontation, negotiation and reconciliation between tradition and modernity. The project promotes thinking of community, the contradictions that exist in and out of established societies, the troubles of urban development, as well as my personal responsibility in preserving this heritage.

Kien Hoang project image 1
Kien Hoang project image 2
Kien Hoang project image 3

Kien Hoang

Kien Hong received his Bachelors of Arts from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2015, before joining The Ohio State University as an MFA candidate in the Digital Animation and Interactive Media program. He currently serves as a Graduate Research Associate at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). His work concerns the role of spatial elements in describing and structuring narratives for the medium of computer animation. Kien previously interned at Pixar Animation Studios and Blizzard Entertainment.