My name is Minh Châu. I’m an artist based in Trondheim, Norway. I draw, paint and make zines. Art is my medium for self-expression and crafting comfort in the moment.
The dream of becoming an artist bloomed somewhere along my journey as a master’s student in English literature. For my thesis, I explored the Vietnamese refugee experience through memoirs told by children of Vietnamese refugees. These writers intertwine literature with visual elements to process their life stories and heal from intergenerational trauma. Through their works, I learned that art is a tool to convey what is often unspeakable. But art also creates space for resilience, recovery, reconnecting with one’s roots, belonging and hope.
Back then in 2019, I had a small project at Litteraturhuset i Trondheim called “Finding Home”. The idea was to bring together migrants and locals living in Trondheim to share our personal stories about home and belonging. It turns out that home means different things, different places, different feelings for each of us. But one lesson stayed with me: that home is something we can find within ourselves. I thought Finding Home could be a place where we create the feeling of home. In 2021, with a friend’s suggestion, I mixed zines into Finding Home, creating a low-stakes art workshop where we handcraft our own “zines”. These little books became a way for us to create, express our experiences, and learn to craft our own comfort.
In many ways, making a zine feels like pulling my mind back into my body. The acts of folding paper and creasing it with my fingers, gluing materials, flipping pages, feeling flow and exploring different textures all contribute to a sensory experience that can be visited again and again. Expression, experimentation and imperfection – these are the core features of zines. They invite us to open up and share the unfinished, unpolished part of ourselves. In my zines, sometimes I play with collage poetry, where I rearrange different cut-up texts on the page, turn them upside down or sideways to create new meaning. I like working with found objects. Paper scraps, scraps of leftover paint, cotton threads, old flight tickets. I collect leaves in interesting shapes, dry them and put them in my zines along with moss and bark.
Zines have taught me to embrace the art of doodling, the freedom of not planning for the final result. This process has deeply influenced the way I draw with fineliner pens. My drawings evolve intuitively, starting from a single motion then building into layered masses. Each piece reflects a messy, raw process of healing underneath. Each one is an attempt to depict life’s vitality, through organic plant-like patterns that coalesce into the shape of the human body.
The same goes with painting, where colours swirl in a loose, free-flowing style. Every stroke leads to the overall sense of energy. I think art is all about the process, the fun, the playfulness, the need to be lost in the moment. And it’s such a vital experience – to accept and let go of the idea of perfection and simply explore and express.
Minh Châu 