2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, wars that caused international outcry. As wars continue across the globe—from Gaza to Ukraine, from Syria to Ethiopia—this exhibition asks: How do we rebuild a world scarred by destruction? What can art teach us about healing and renewal?
We are reminded that the scars of conflict endure long after the last shot is fired. From the ashes of war, Southeast Asian refugees have cultivated new life, embodying the resilience of the lotus—a symbol of rebirth that blooms even in the harshest conditions.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen installation view. A Lotus Blooming in a Sea of Fire draws on the wisdom of Southeast Asian refugees, the largest refugee group ever settled in the U.S., to explore how art can foster healing. Through immersive sculptures, textiles, films, and performances, visitors are invited to reflect on their own roles in cultivating a world where war is not the end but the beginning of new possibilities.
At its core, this exhibition imagines a future where communities and the planet recover and thrive, shaped by the resilience of those who have endured unimaginable loss. It invites viewers to envision healing not only for humanity but for all living beings—human, animal, and ecological—impacted by war. It is both a reflection on the past and a blueprint for a future where life can flourish again.
Masters of Transformation
The artists gathered here share a radical approach to making: they take the instruments and legacies of war and transmute them into vessels for healing. This is not metaphorical work. These are artists who understand that transformation requires direct engagement with what has caused harm.
Pao Houa Her, Nim ye, 2024, five-channel video, color, sound. 13 minutes, looped. Pao Houa Her constructs a multichannel installation that functions as a ceremony—a song about new beginnings that honors the rituals that mark
transition and renewal. Her work recognizes that healing is not silent or solitary but communal and melodic. Through sound, she creates space for rebirth, reminding us that change itself deserves to be celebrated, that transformation is worthy of song.
Leang Hu, Woman Who Sharpened Her Grief, 2025, poetry, handwriting on the wall Leang Hu brings a poet’s precision to the question of inherited trauma. Rather than attempting to break cycles—a violent metaphor in itself—Hu speaks of bending them, finding plasticity within patterns that seemed fixed. This distinction matters. It acknowledges that we cannot simply erase what has been passed down, but we can reshape it, create new forms from old materials, and become artists of our own inheritance.
Ger Xiong, Interchanging, 2019, Fabric, embroidery thread, copper, steel, wood, 43 x 35.5 x 1 in. Ger Xiong makes visible the gradual nature of change through interactive sculpture. War did not happen all at once, and neither does healing. Xiong’s work invites participation, asking viewers to contribute to incremental shifts that accumulate over time. Each small gesture adds color, adds dimension, documents how transformation happens not in dramatic ruptures but in the patient accretion of daily acts.
Kenn Pan, Untitled, 2025, vietnamese hemp, stone, 48 x 60 in. Kenn Diep Pan anchors the exhibition in Indigenous ancestral textile traditions that operated within regenerative economies long before such language existed. Against the extractive violence of both war and the contemporary fashion industry, Pan’s work demonstrates what it means to create in relationship with the natural world rather than in domination of it. These textiles carry forward ecological knowledge, insisting that healing the land and healing the body are inseparable acts.
A Time Capsule and a Vision
By marking this 50th anniversary, A Lotus Blooming in a Sea of Fire serves as both memorial and manifesto. It holds space for what was lost while insisting on what might yet grow. Southeast Asian artists and refugee communities have not simply survived—they have transformed the remnants of war into living, breathing art.
The exhibition asks each visitor to consider: What are we inheriting? What are we bending? What small acts of color are we adding to the world? In witnessing these works, we are invited not only to remember but to participate in the ongoing project of building a world where life—in all its forms—can flourish again.
An Exerpt of The Woman Who Sharpened Her Grief by Leang Hu
I’ve always known my grandmother as a hard woman. Sharp. Blunt. Not easy to love, but impossible to ignore. In our family, she was both a myth and a warning. People spoke of her with equal parts reverence and resentment. Some blamed her for wounds they never forgave. Others quietly leaned on her strength. I grew up inside those contradictions, breathing them in before I even understood their weight.
She gave birth to seven children. Most of them died under the Khmer Rouge. Only my mother survived. Family stories—whispered, retold, half-believed—still question her choices: Could she have done more to save her children? Should she have chosen them over her siblings?
But how do you measure a mother’s love in a time ruled by death? How do you measure survival when every path is a dead end?
She was the third of twelve children. One of her younger sisters once told her, You can have more children. You can remarry. But you only have one set of siblings. I do not know how much that shaped my grandmother’s choices. But I know she carried the weight of those words—and the consequences—for the rest of her life.
I do not know everything she lived through. I do not know what impossible choices she faced. I only know this: she was the one who stole food when no one else dared. She once said, I’d rather be full and dead than starved and alive. She laid next to the bodies of her parents, pretending they were still breathing—just to collect their half-spoon of rice. And it wasn’t just her parents. It was her siblings. Her children.
One by one, she lay beside them all—not only to mourn, but to survive.
We were sitting on the couch watching Maury—one of those reunion episodes. A mother was about to be reunited with a long-lost child. My grandmother stared at the screen, then turned to me. I began interpreting. As soon as I signed that the mother and child had found each other and were embracing, something shifted in her. Her eyes welled up. Her face flushed. Slowly, she curled into herself…her body folding inward, knees drawn close, one hand gripping the edge of her sarong.
She crouched into a half-fetal position, her shoulders trembling. Then, with a face full of anguish, she signed:
“I wish I could be with my babies.”
Her voice cracked open. So did something in me. I had never seen her like that. Not when we talked about the war. Not even when relatives died.
In that moment, I ached for her—not only for the loss of her children, but for the way survival had demanded she bury her tenderness just to keep living. I saw it then—the way war had stolen her chance to love without urgency, to grieve without strategy, to be gentle without consequence.
She did love me. She had always loved me.
But her love had been shaped by what was left after the fire. And it could never fully blossom into something soft, something easy, because the world had never given her a safe place to let it. War had taken not only her children, but the space for her love to grow in the open.
And still—it was there.
People remember her strength. But I remember her grief.
The ash we inhale did not only come from the world that burned around us…it came from her, too. From her silence. Her fear. Her toughness. Her heartbreak, buried so deep it hardened into habit.
