Inspired by the traditional Oản cake—a bell-shaped offering made from rice flour and commonly presented on Vietnamese ancestral altars—Oan hỏi Oản weaves a narrative that transcends temporal boundaries, merging the past with the present. In this work, part of Enigma of Arrival, Duong Thuy Nguyen returns the Oản cake to its symbolic origin: the bell.

By presenting nine of the 108 Oản forms, the work invokes the 108 rings of the pagoda bell, resonating with Buddhist cosmology. According to Buddhist teachings, the number 108 signifies the human afflictions: six senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and consciousness) multiplied by three responses (pleasure, pain, neutrality), then by two moral valences (good or bad), resulting in 36 states. These, multiplied by past, present, and future, yield 108—a number recited or struck to cleanse the soul, awaken consciousness, and illuminate the path toward compassion and right action.

The pristine white of the traditional Oản—composed of flour and sugar—signifies purity and the unity of heaven and earth. Often seen in spiritual settings such as pagodas, communal houses, and family altars, the Oản is both a sacred object and a gesture of remembrance. Nguyen recontextualises it, offering not a literal recreation but a sculptural meditation—an invocation of its symbolic gravity in contemporary diasporic life.

Rooted in a genealogy of decolonial thinking and diasporic identity, Oan hỏi Oản meditates on displacement, belonging, and the movement between tradition and modernity. The Oản form becomes a vessel for ancestral echo and personal reckoning. Cast in bio resin, metal, and acrylic, these forms are reimagined as contemporary artefacts—simultaneously ephemeral and enduring.

In this convergence of material, memory, and belief, Nguyen’s work proposes a new cosmology—where the transient rhythms of migration intersect with the eternal resonance of cultural heritage. Here, the visible and the invisible entwine, allowing for a space of speculative belonging, where the echoes of the bell, the symbolism of the cake, and the pulse of personal history ring in quiet unison.