Cynthia Mai Ammann

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Floating View (2019 - ongoing)

This series portrays Sài Gòn (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam’s economic capital and the native city of my mother. Since the Đôi mói reforms of 1986, the country has transformed into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Skyscrapers rise across the skyline, shaping a new identity influenced by capitalist aspirations yet still marked by traces of the past.
Oscillating between documentary and fiction, the work reflects on the city’s polarization: its restless drive toward the future alongside lingering echoes of what came before. Vietnamese youth embody this tension, navigating utopian promises and fractured realities while shaping the city’s shifting character. Seen through the distance and nearness of being a daughter to a Vietnamese immigrant mother, the work searches for the landscapes she once remembered. The images question how inherited memories meet today’s altered landscape, and what it means to search for identity in a place suspended between remembrance and reinvention.