Grills in Pause invites viewers to linger in the overlooked details of Vietnamese urban life. Drawing on Tran Hau Yen The’s Song Xua Pho Cu and Ilaria Coser’s The Marvellous Ironwork of the Windows of Vietnam, the work isolates a series of ubiquitous window grill motifs and translates them into endlessly looping moving motifs. In these simple animations, the quiet poetry of vernacular forms is frozen and replayed, urging a pause for attentive looking — an invitation to notice what is typically unseen.
The project first emerged as a tentative experiment, through which a handful of motifs were coded, then set aside after ten iterations — too simple, too fragmentary, seemingly unfinished. Yet revisiting them, incompleteness began to feel less like a flaw than a method. The moving motifs remain deliberately provisional: reduced, repetitive, awkward, but in that awkwardness they resist polish and finality. Rather than striving for machine optimisation, Grills in Pause offers a modest counter-gesture: loops that neither explain nor conclude, where the focus is on the geometry of the motifs while their original functions — protective, decorative, symbolic — remain suspended in uncertainty.
In this sense, the moving motifs operate as sites of both hesitation and curiosity. The handmade becomes algorithmic, yet the algorithm lingers in process, dwelling in a space of “not knowing.” Early white and grey versions maintain a skeletal neutrality, echoing this refusal of efficiency or closure. Later colour palettes, however, were sampled directly from the hues of Vietnam’s urban landscape — painted facades, faded shutters, weathered tiles — reintroducing local textures into the stripped-down motifs. Across these variations, the work moves from abstraction to rediscovery, framing repetition not as resolution but as a renewed opening: a way of re-seeing the familiar, and of dwelling in the unstable space between cultural specificity and machine reproduction.
