Dacchi Dang was just 16 when he left his hometown of Saigon, folding himself into an 11-metre fishing boat and set sail for Malaysia in 1982.
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With him were his two sisters, his brother and around 135 others, all crammed like sardines in the hold of a boat designed to carry four or five people, and all looking for a better life outside war-torn Vietnam.
Nearly 35 years later, Dang is still fascinated by the social upheaval that has led to the splintering of several different cultures, the blossoming of a new culture in his adopted homeland of Australia, and a generation of veterans from both countries, still living with their experiences on the battlefield.
As a teenager, he spent nine months in a Malaysian camp with his siblings, before being accepted as refugees to Australia.
He learnt English, finished high school and eventually completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.
His experiences, as well as the events that led to his traumatic journey to Australia and subsequent assimilation, are themes that arise constantly in his work as an artist.
He has just spent six weeks as an artist in residence at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, which has commissioned him to create works informed by the relationship between Australian and South Vietnamese veterans.
The commission is the result of a bequest from retired Major John Milton Gillespie, a Vietnam veteran and immigration consultant.
The memorial decided to use the bequest to commission a work of art that explores the wartime experience of Vietnamese-Australians and its continued legacy.
"Most of my work in the past explores culture and memory in Vietnam. The early work is informed a lot by refugee and boat experience, and also the notion of home, and the impact on Vietnamese people living away from home, looking at how they integrate into new societies and cultures," Dang said.
"It's not until this year I had the opportunity and fortune …to look specifically at the relationship between the Australian veterans who served in Vietnam, and also of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam."
For the first half of the commission, he plans to print photographic images taken from the War Memorial's collection onto plywood panels and overlay them with lacquer – a traditional Vietnamese technique.
It's a new avenue for him as an artist, and the use of lacquer has several layers of symbolism in it; for example, the lacquer is derived from rubber trees, and the Battle of Long Tan, one of the most infamous episodes from the Vietnam War, took place in a rubber plantation.
"The work has a lot of symbolism and meaning behind how it's constructed in the final pieces," he says.
"I've tried to put links through the materials, through the images, through the stories and all that, using that to tell the story between our veterans and others."
He also plans to create a multi-media work, made up of photography, video, animation and drawings; all up, the commission will take until 2018 to complete.
