Phi Phi Oanh’s unique practice and methodology is anchored in the study of lacquer and pushes the boundaries of the material as a sculptural and conceptual form. Referring to her artworks as organs and as becoming beings with their own personalities harkening a kind of consciousness, and to the process of layering sap as a kind of ‘skin’ (sap being from the cây s?n tree), she believes lacquer to possess its own breathing body. She celebrates lacquer as an interface, experienced via light and movement–two essential elements to nearly all forms of life and two signature concepts of her broader practice. She is also drawn to lacquer’s highly laborious and lengthy process of production, deeply aware that machines, which overly exert a sense of efficiency in our 21st century haptic lives, overly dominate our everyday as a measurement of time.