Tracy Dong, Reassemblage
Gallery / 24 images
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and Saigon fell to the North, one of the first things Tracy Dong’s father did was to burn his photographs. Recruited by the US military while in high school in Vietnam, he had served as a second lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army against the communist Viet Cong. Destroying the images did little to spare him years spent in a re-education and labour camp, but it did protect him from further persecution tied to his rank. Dong only recently learned about the destroyed photographs, but growing up in Canada – where her family settled in the 1990s – she had long felt their absence.
“There was such an upheaval of events before my birth in Vancouver that I didn’t have any documentation or visual archive of,” she tells Dazed. “It left this big hole of understanding as to how I even got to Canada.” That void became the foundation of her photographic practice – a constant process of question and answer that shapes her latest series, Reassemblage. Tracing her own journey from Canada to the US and on to Berlin, where she has recently made a home among one of Europe’s largest Vietnamese diasporas, the project captures moments of care and expression among her new friends in the German capital, and explores what it means to rebuild an archive, a community, and a self in the wake of displacement and migration.
After escaping Vietnam by boat in 1989, Dong’s parents spent 3 years in refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia, where her father had his sights set firmly on America. “He fought for them and, in turn, they promised him the dream – if you have to leave your homeland, come to America and live a better life.” But the waitlist for asylum was long and living conditions in the camps were tough, so the family accepted sponsorship to Canada when the opportunity arose. Even so, her father’s commitment to America loomed large over her upbringing. “He always told me that America is the end goal – not just for me but for the whole family.”
For 12 years, Dong tried to make that dream a reality, attending college in the US on a tennis scholarship before moving to New York and juggling a tech job with photography studies. “But the pressure became too much to bear,” she admits. “The longer I stayed in America, the more burnt out and disillusioned I became.”
Returning to New York after spending the summer of 2024 in Berlin, Dong retreated into the darkroom. “Watching the portraits rise up in the darkness was this realisation of how precious these friendships had become, and the weight of the story being told,” she says. Echoing the fragmented structure of Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T Minh-Ha’s 1982 documentary Reassemblage – the project’s namesake – she collaged the images with postcards, letters, journal entries and visas gathered over that period. It also felt necessary to turn the camera inward, making self-portraits in her New York apartment to process the growing sense that “one life was starting to shed and another was beginning to take shape.”
Around the same time, Dong found herself travelling to Berlin more frequently for work, where she formed friendships in a Vietnamese diaspora shaped by its own complex history of division. During the Cold War, Berlin’s Vietnamese population emerged through two distinct migration routes: South Vietnamese refugees settled in West Germany after the fall of Saigon in 1975, while North Vietnamese contract workers were recruited to East Germany under labour agreements in the 1980s. Long after the reunification of both countries, those geographical and ideological fault lines – between North and South, East and West – continued to influence community networks. Among younger generations, however, the boundaries are beginning to soften.
“It was my first time meeting people whose families came from North Vietnam – once positioned as the ‘enemy’,” Dong recalls. “Here we were, gathered around the same tables, choosing connection, without the ideological binaries and imperial entanglements that defined our parents’ lives.” Recognising that she had stepped into a moment of burgeoning cultural expression, as many in the diaspora embraced their hyphenated identities with newfound confidence, she began photographing her friends and learning more about their stories. “I asked, ‘How do I photograph you in a way that makes you feel most connected to Vietnam?’ We spent a lot of time cooking in kitchens, or sitting in their studios while they made art.”
Shortly after Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Dong received news that her US green card application had been approved, a moment she’d once dreamed of. She responded by declining the application and beginning the process of moving to Berlin.
The only member of her family born in Canada after their migration, Dong had always felt like “the black sheep” – not Vietnamese enough at home, but not westernised enough among English-speaking peers. Now, surrounded by Vietnamese restaurants, practising the language, and attending monthly potlucks like Cơm Together – where members set the world to rights over steaming dishes before ending the night with karaoke – Berlin has helped to heal those wounds. “Berlin has brought me closer to just about everything: my heritage, my community, my queerness, my identity as a Việt kiều,” she says. “It’s a place where people come to find their people.”
The distance has been difficult for her family, who are still coming to terms with the move. Yet the project has also brought to the surface topics and memories that were once buried deep. On a recent trip back to Vancouver, Dong’s father shared previously unseen photographs from the family’s years in refugee camps. “It’s been shock after shock learning more about what they endured after the war,” she says. “But it’s also affirmed why this work matters.”
What began with the absence left by her father’s burned photographs has become a deeply loving act of reconstruction: a photographic record she hopes will go some way towards repairing the gaps in her own history – and preventing similar absences in future.
Follow Tracy on Instagram to keep up with her work, and check out her website. Reassemblage will be shown at FotoBali during a projector slideshow program curated by Worlds Through Minds.
