The Souls that Sustain Us

Life, Death, and Ecology in Selected Works by Lêna Bùi

Blake Palmer

^{Lêna Bùi, Vegetable Diary, 2016, pencil and watercolor on paper, Set of 60 30 x 30cm drawings.
All images courtesy of the artist, Lêna Bùi.}

How should we live in a world where our being is inextricably bound up in the deaths of others? What does it mean to situate oneself within a cycle of exchange, rather than at the apex of a hierarchical food chain? Who am “I” if I acknowledge that my existence as an individual is contingent on an innumerable assemblage of diverse beings, both within and beyond the bounded parameters I think of as “my” body?
 
Saigon-based multimedia artist, Lêna Bùi, wrestles with these essential questions in her work, but is hesitant to claim any authoritative answers. “To be honest, I’ve always had many conflicting thoughts about how I live and what I think is the right way. If I were to live true to my beliefs I should be an ascetic instead of an artist.”^[1]

Perhaps, in the absence of easy answers, it is a commitment to our questions, what ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood calls the “refusal to deny the dilemma,” that is most urgent and necessary.^[2] Confronted with an increasingly alienated world, in which the majority of our social and political systems center atomized individualism and situate humanity as being separate from and above nature, to grapple with the complexities of inclusive relationality becomes an act of resistance unto itself. 
 
Plumwood, like Bùi, understands being as an inherently relational phenomenon, emerging from and sustained by flows of vital energy and matter within entangled ecological webs. In her writings she points to the rise of Cartesian “dualisms”—constructed categories that define, naturalize, and differentiate dominant and subordinate classes in a hierarchy of power—which provided a foundational justification for systems of mass exploitation and extraction that fuel colonialist and capitalist expansion.^[3] These dualisms not only establish and reify categories of, supposedly, superior and inferior classes like human/nature, male/female, and mind/body, but they attempt to isolate the two sides of these splits from one another by exaggerating their differences and denying any relational dependency of the “superior” class on the “inferior” class. In short, the systems that dominate most of our social and political relations were built on a philosophy of hierarchical non-relationality in which those who occupy positions of whiteness, maleness, humanity, and rationality are given free reign over a world from which they may take everything and to which they owe nothing.

Bùi’s work addresses one the core fallacies underlying this way of thinking, the logic of “denied dependency” that portrays humanity as being outside of and unbeholden to the webs of relational exchange that continually produce and reproduce the worlds we occupy.^[4] Her ongoing series, Circulations, originated from a dream in which “multiple creatures passed through [her] body, moving as if through a portal between this world and other worlds.”^[5] In this series, Bùi uses material and compositional elements to draw our attention to the complex entanglements that contribute to what many think of as individual being.  

These works are composed of layered watercolor paintings on sheer silk, with printed or painted images visible behind the semi-transparent canvas. The paintings can be read as abstract depictions of ecological flows. Repeating lines form concentric circular patterns that intersect with geometric shapes and depictions of vegetation. As with most patterns found in the natural world, there are degrees of continuity and symmetry in these compositions, but never complete, pure, or mechanistic. This openness to entanglement, interruption, and diversity is key to Bùi’s understanding of nature as well as her own conceptual framework. “Things are never pure,” she says. “Ideas constantly transform and people (including me) often mix and match to serve our own needs. My only absolute belief is in the need for multiplicity and diversity.”^[6]
 
Bùi’s intellectual fluidity allows her to take in ideas from her cultural milieu without holding them too rigidly. She draws on Buddhism, Taoism, animism, philosophy, and science, freely drawing from elements of each while leaving behind those aspects that might close her off to fruitful lines of inquiry and the possibility of new insights. This is exemplified in Circulations 1, in which a sheer painting depicting an oblong loop of lines hovers in front of the printed image of an altar nestled between two trees. In Vietnam, and throughout Southeast Asia, altars like these are often sites of syncretic worship, allowing practitioners to pay respect to Buddha images alongside local and ancestral spirits embedded in the natural world around them. This juxtaposition of organic life, spiritual presence, and circular flows evokes an assemblage of seemingly unrelated concepts—ecology, reincarnation, ancestral presence, and ensouled nature—and finds the proverbial middle path where they all overlap and converge. 

With these connections in view, it becomes possible for viewers to consider critical questions while leaving themselves open to thinking from multiple vantage points simultaneously. What does it really mean to live on as another being after death? What do we owe to those whose lives and deaths have made our own lives possible? If our bodies, and our parents’ bodies, have been constituted and kept alive by multiplicities of more-than-human others, then who should we think of as our ancestors? 
 
If we think outside of the framework of dualism, we must consider the being of others, in meaningful ways, akin to ours. We must acknowledge the diverse array of more-than-human beings who are living and dying alongside and, even, within us as whole and agential beings. Plumwood addresses this in relation to trophic exchange within food systems, saying “we cannot ignore the fact that all our food is souls.”^[7] The works in Circulations offer Bùi a way to grapple with these dilemmas, asking “If the body is an ecosystem of sorts then why not the soul? If we die and disperse into all sorts of nutrients that are absorbed by other living things, then maybe our souls, too, split into small parts that get reconfigured into new souls.”^[8]
 
The material construction of pieces in this series also works to trouble the nature of individual being in a co-constituted world. By layering individual paintings on top of one another and presenting them as a single composition, Bùi produces the illusion of singularity from multiplicity. These individual paintings are brought into relation with one another to produce a new complex individual, pointing to the entangled relational dynamics that she, pulling from the philosophy of Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, refers to as “inter-being.” Bùi explains this concept as a kind of ontological interdependence, saying, “Inter-being is a default state. If the rest of the natural world becomes sick, it will come back to bite us. Taking care of other beings is taking care of ourselves. I think karma is collective and not an individual merit card.”^[9]
 
This rejection of atomized individualism aligns strikingly with feminist theorist and quantum physicist Karen Barad’s work on relational co-being. In their theory of “agential realism”, Barad uses “intra-action”, a term similar to Nhất Hạnh’s “inter-being”, to describe the idea that the “individual” is not an innate and fixed ontological state, but is created and reconfigured phenomenologically through the act of relational engagement.^[10] Once intra-active phenomena between “individuals” end, any apparent separation that differentiates them dissipates or ceases to be meaningful. Connection turns out to be the normative default and separation is the fleeting exception. Bùi’s thoughts find harmony with Barad’s, “I don’t think “the individual” truly exists. We’re social creatures. Beyond our physical needs we have a real need for human connection, and beyond that a connection to the space we live in and other non-human beings surrounding us. When these connections are weak and few, it can get difficult.”^[11]
 
This difficulty is becoming more apparent and more dire as the dualistic thinking that drives capitalism, industrial agriculture, and modernist hyper-development seeks to sever connections that are essential to our being. The results of this ontological violence have been disastrous; climate catastrophe, mass extinction, and ecocide are already underway, with global consequences. Bùi confronts the consequences of anthropocentric attempts by some humans to cut ourselves off from relational connections with the rest of nature in a series called Blue Filaments.

Works in this series focus on the felling of 143 Khaya Senegalensis trees, ranging from 100 to 150 years old, to make way for an urban development project in the heart of Saigon. This culling is complicated by the fact that these trees are not native to Southeast Asia, but were brought over from West Africa, another target of French colonial rule. What initially appears as a tragic, but familiar, story of ecological destruction in the name of so-called development takes on extra layers of significance when connected to questions about displacement, indigeneity, and the lingering impacts of colonial oppression.
 
Through the denied dependency that accompanies Western dualism, colonial powers sought to justify relationships based on mastery and subjugation. By cutting the connection between constructed categories—culture and nature, human and non-human, master and slave—and bestowing themselves with the authority to determine who belonged in which category, they immersed themselves in a worldview that allowed them to extract, displace, and destroy with perceived impunity.^[12] The trees in Blue Filaments, extracted from their native home, displaced into an unfamiliar setting, and destroyed when no longer convenient, are a testament to this colonial belief in human mastery over nature.
 
Shortly after the Khaya Senegalensis trees were cut down, Bùi undertook a month-long performance project in which she visited the development site every day to make rubbings of the stumps. In conversation, Bùi talked about how she “naively” hoped she might get clear impressions of the trees from her rubbings, perhaps even clear enough to count their rings. Instead, what appeared in her rubbings were the jagged, obfuscating scars of chainsaw cuts. This numbered collection of rubbings under the Blue Filament series, each titled chainsaw marks, speaks to the difficulty of recovering what has been lost as a result of human attempts to extract ourselves from webs of ecological entanglement.

The belief that humans—some humans more than others—are separate from and above nature is still pervasive throughout much of the world, and is at the root of many of our most harmful practices. It can be seen in the way we eat through plantation farming, mass pesticide use, and industrial animal agriculture. It is embedded in the way we live through urban sprawl, habitat destroying infrastructure projects, and ecocidal extraction of “natural resources” as raw materials for development. It even informs the way we deal with death, especially in places where humans  attempt to permanently remove their bodies from flows of trophic exchange through chemical embalming and air-tight, steel caskets.
 
There are a growing number of people who understand both the danger and futility of this mode of alienated human exceptionalism, and have started looking for ways to turn back from our current path, to repair and restore what has been harmed or lost. What quickly becomes apparent, however, is that there is no path of return. Too many species have been lost; too many habitats have been irrevocably altered; too much indigenous knowledge has been destroyed or erased. The world can never again be what it once was. It is becoming clear, to those who did not already know, that humans cannot be extracted from the relations that co-constitute our being, without doing immeasurable violence to ourselves and others. In Bùi’s own words, “trying to place oneself out of the flow does not mean that you can. It’s only a matter of what kind of flow you are engaging in or, rather, swept up in.”^[13]
 
Fully grasping and accepting this painful reality is not a reason to give oneself over to despair and inaction. Rather, it is a first, difficult step towards understanding that there is still so much work to be done and so much remaining that can be saved. In searching for paths forward, it is helpful to look to and learn from the many indigenous communities who have never lost sight of our collective interdependence, even as dualistic, colonial institutions have worked to destroy and repress their knowledges, lifeways, and worlds.
 
Indigenous scholars, like Potawatomi plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, implore us to embrace the inescapability of our mutual entanglement with the more-than-human world, saying “We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”^[14] Kimmerer invites us to form new networks of attentive, respectful relations of mutual exchange with our ecological communities through a process she refers to as, “becoming indigenous to a place.” By this she isn’t suggesting that we co-opt indigenous or ethnic identities that are not our own, but that we cultivate deep relationships of care with the places we call home and the diverse beings who are our neighbors. In her own words, “becoming indigenous to a place” means that we should live “as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”^[15]

In her works, Vegetable Diary and Innocent Grasses I & II, Bùi documents her own journey building deeper relationships with her ecological surroundings. Vegetable Diary is a series of 60 works, developed in collaboration with artist Nguyen Quoc Dung, that speak to the role community can play in (re)connecting with local food systems. The works emerged from conversations between Bùi, a city-dweller for most of her life, and Dung, who grew up farming with his family in the Vietnamese countryside. Pieces from this series consist of half-painted botanical drawings of fruits and vegetables commonly cultivated in Vietnam, along with partial excerpts of their discussions. The unfinished quality of the paintings suggests a project of learning and understanding that is still in process. Bùi’s knowledge of these plants may be incomplete, but through an exchange of stories and experiences with a trusted friend, she has deepened her understanding of local agriculture and food webs.
 
Innocent Grasses I brings a similar project of understanding even closer to home. In this work, Bùi turns her attention from familiar agricultural mainstays to overlooked urban plants, generally labeled as weeds. Through her engagement with traditional Vietnamese medicine, she learns that each of these plants have medicinal value that she describes as having been “lost” or forgotten. By drawing attention to these plants and their traditional uses, Bùi takes on the dual role of student and teacher, making it easier for city residents in Vietnam to appreciate and connect with the plant life they encounter in their daily routines.

These works cast a critical gaze on a world in which many of us have sacrificed our relationships with food, medicine, and even each other at the altar of convenience. For most of us, this was not a deliberate or malicious choice, but simply a byproduct of accepting the world as we found it and allowing ourselves to be pushed along the path of least resistance. Through her practice, Bùi observes the hidden cost of these easy conveniences. She encourages us to ask ourselves what we have surrendered in the name of modernism and efficiency and to consider whether some of it might be worth saving. She says, “The seemingly small and banal elements that surround us daily are never quite as simple as they appear and never innocent. A lot of what we think is evil or bad stems from apathy and mindlessness.”^[16]
 
Nắng Bằng Phẳng or Flat Sunlight, a fictional video work written and directed by Bùi, depicts a young woman, Giang, going through this process of questioning and re-evaluating some of the values that shape modern food systems and ecological relations. In this mix of fictional narrative and documentary footage, Giang visits her aunt’s countryside home. Over the course of her stay, she becomes involved with her aunt’s small pig farm, eventually developing an interest in learning about current and traditional pig rearing practices. Through conversations with her aunt, she learns how the traditional diets of farmed pigs, consisting of hand prepared grains, roots, and vegetables, have been replaced by industrial feed. She sees how the pressures of capitalist markets, the exploitation of small farmers, and the increased scale required to make ends meet has made it nearly impossible to maintain ecologically-grounded traditional methods—which in many ways may be healthier, more humane, and more sustainable. Giang even begins to question her own role in the flows of life and death that constitute trophic exchanges. At a critical moment in Giang’s development, she stands in the middle of her aunt’s pig pen and reads a passage from Thích Nhất Hạnh’s reflections on life, death, and inter-being:
 
“Life is always with death. Not before, not after. Where there is life, there is death. And where there is death, there is life. This needs a little bit of meditation to understand. In Buddhism, we speak of the inter-being of all things. It means that you cannot be by yourself, alone. You have to inter-be with the other sides. It is like the left and the right. 

When biologists observe the body of a human being, they see that life and death happens at the same time. In this very moment, thousands and thousands of cells are dying. When you scratch your skin, many cells fall down. They are cells that have died. Because you are so busy you don’t notice you are dying. If those cells are dead then you are dying. We think that we have to wait 50 or 70 years later in order to die. That is not true. Death is not waiting for us down the road. Death is happening right at this moment, right now and right here.”^[17]

The disruption of dualisms that separate life from death and isolates individuals from their histories and communities is a critical and consistent component of Bùi’s work. Her oeuvre can be seen as an extended conversation, with herself and with her audience, in which she gently but persuasively builds a case for us to let go of our “exceptional” lives and situate our being as one aspect of a larger whole, or as Bùi says, as “one in a forest of kin.”^[18]
 
Making this adjustment to our relational perspectives is not easy. The process is fraught with unresolveable dilemmas, external obstacles, and requires a willingness to identify and reject the ideologies of mastery that distort our worldview. Plumwood acknowledges this difficulty, saying “Justice in the ecological sphere has tough rules that we have shown great resistance to accepting. It consists of a very radical egalitarian framework in which you have your little piece of life force for just so long as it’s not wanted by another.”^[19]
 
Challenging though it may be, this transition is a necessary one, not only for our survival as a species, but also as a path to end the violent practices of ecological isolation and interpersonal atomization that we have imposed on ourselves and others for so long. To take on the work of rebuilding meaningful and mindful relationships with our ecological neighbors is to open ourselves up to healing the ontological wounds of imposed dualism and bringing ourselves back into relation with beings whose lives are inseparable from our own. To invoke Plumwood one final time, as an intellectual companion to Bùi’s work, “By understanding life as in circulation, as a gift from a community of ancestors, we can see death as recycling, a flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins.”^[20]

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_{^[1] Lêna Bùi in discussion with Blake Palmer, online interview, English language, May 2024.
^[2] Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (Canberra, ACT: ANU Press, 2012), p. 61.
^[3] Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 42.
^[4] Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 21.
^[5] Lêna Bùi, Portfolio, 2024, p. 6.
^[6] Bùi, interview.
^[7] Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, p. 44.
^[8] Bùi, interview.
^[9] Ibid.
^[10] Adam Kleinmann, “Intra-Actions: An Interview with Karen Barad by Adam Kleinmann,” Mousse 34 (2012): 76–81.
^[11] Bùi, interview.
^[12] Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.
^[13] Bùi, interview.
^[14] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), p. 15.
^[15] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 9.
^[16] Bùi, interview.
^[17] Lêna Bùi, Flat Sunlight, 2016, video installation, 47 min 45 sec.
^[18] Lêna Bùi, Kindred, 2021, video installation, 7 minutes 38 sec.
^[19] Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, p. 45.
^[20] Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, p. 92.}

Author Biography

Blake Palmer is a scholar, writer, and cultural critic based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, working primarily on Asian contemporary art. His interests are drawn towards the intersection of culture, power, and art as a vector of sociopolitical critique. His academic research as a master’s student at Chiang Mai University focuses on multispecies biopolitics and indigenous foodways in the Southeast Asian context.

His recent work includes contemporary art analysis for Art Monthly Australasia, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Curationist, and Art & Market, as well as multispecies ethnographic work for e-Flux Journal. He has taught as a lecturer in the Department of English at Vietnam National University (2013-2014), as well as teaching English in Seoul, South Korea (2012-2013).

He is currently working on, Bring Me Curry When I’m Gone, a book exploring food, sustainability, and Thai funeral traditions with Chiang Mai-based chef and Slow Food activist Yaowadee Chookong, and is writing a novel in the gothic tradition of the American South.