Visra Vichit Vadakan
Sunlight falls across the field in a bright swath. A child laughs.
Leaves rustle. Dappled light falls across a girl in the climbing tree.
Visra Vichit Vadakan (born in 1981) has been a filmmaker for over 15 years. While raising her children pulled her away from filmmaking for a time, she recalls moments when the artist in her was called to emerge. The photographs taken in such moments—her then one-year-old son running in a sunlit meadow, for instance—constitute the imagery for new wax photo transfers on canvas debuting in the artist’s first foray into the space of fine art galleries. The exhibition combines wax photo transfers on canvas, an evocative audio soundtrack, and home video presented in the form of a paned window. The artist has been gathering these photographs and videos of her family life for a sci-fi film she is currently writing with themes of interstellar and intergenerational family displacement, intending for this imagery of her own children’s childhood to feature in the film as the memories of ancestors.
In her filmmaking, Vichit Vadakan has carved out a niche of hybrid documentary-fiction films, featuring, in one instance, her grandparents playing fictitious characters based on themselves, and in another, documentary footage combined with scripted dramatizations of real experiences. The artist describes her practice as “taking reality and filtering it through creative practice until the line between document and fiction becomes productively blurred.” Likewise, her visual art hovers between a memory and a dream. For Vichit Vadakan and her children, these photographs represent memories. Textures, gaps, and distortions produced through the wax transfer process, though, give the photographs on canvas such a strong affective and sensate quality that viewers feel as if they might be there or as if they might have once been there, too.
Vichit Vadakan’s filmmaker’s sensibility is thus apparent not only in the immersive, multi-sensorial experience the artist has created for viewers of this exhibition, but also in this deeply affective quality that her work shares with cinema. Vichit Vadakan’s new work taps into our bodies’ ability to make meaning sensorially even before it forms a conscious thought. As film theorist Vivian Sobchack wrote in “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” “the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies.” She continues, “That is, we do not experience any movie only through our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being” and so “as cinesthetic subjects, then, we possess an embodied intelligence that opens our eyes far beyond their discrete capacity for vision.” Seeing Vichit Vadakan’s garden represented as a wax photo transfer on canvas provoked in me the same sensation as walking into the garden itself where Vichit Vadakan with her friends and family prepare the wax transfer sheets. More incredibly, the tactile product of that wax transfer process gave me an intuitive sense of how it would feel to experience that communal making process.
For me, the most effective and affective part of Vichit Vadakan’s photo transfers is their sense of light. It’s not only pictured in the imagery but produced through the transfer process, patches of lighter transfer reading, in one image for instance, as reflections on water. The sense of light in lush green spaces or just inside window frames elicits the feeling of sun on my own skin, a warm breeze caressing me, and a peel of laughter touching my ear.
“Breathe in… Breathe out… “
“Look at the pretty flowers along the way”
Text by Maggie Dethloff
On view through Dec. 13, 2025
Micki Meng Chinatown
Photography by Graham Holoch
