GPYL — The Anh

Core Idea: nostalgia and memories of childhood fading into oblivion
Medium: pixel art
Outcome: a series of intimate spaces from my childhood, made by pixel art
Year: 2023
Time spent: 150+ days

Nostalgia and memory is a slippery thing, and this was my shot at solidifying and archiving the bittersweetness of remembering and dwelling on what once was… through an expanding pixel art series of intimate spaces.

My grandmother’s house, from the inside

My grandmother’s house, from the outside

My first rented apartment in university, in Saigon.

My first childhood home in Hanoi’s city center.

My second childhood home in Hanoi’s city center.

The iMac computer lab at my uni, where I call my second home.

Where I felt the most pain in my life.

I chose pixel art, for it’s ability to strip off subject matters down to mere colored squares, leaving behind only the subjects’ core essence. I’m a 00s’ kid too, so computer graphics grew up with me.

Gathering material and staying true to the Past was my core mission - and each scene required dumpster diving and asking for old photos from family and relatives. My sourcing had to be as detailed as possible, so I could maintain that precise realism while also staying true to the memories. Many times I needed to stop everything just to find a certain photo of an object, and not all searches were successful. I could not allow myself to be deceitful. Some of the scenes are actually, much less detailed from the lack of accurate reference.

All of the found reference, from personal and online sources

I needed to etch out these spaces on paper first, as the final POVs are kind of ‘locked’, like an architectural plan.
Same goes for the tiny bitty objects that populated the scenes.

I have a much longer list of potential spaces, going as far as my first house in childhood to the first nightclub I’ve been to. That’s the beauty I intend this project to have, acting almost like a (personal) time capsule. I don’t know what exactly makes a space worthy of being in the roster, but I know they all left a major imprint on me.

a speedpaint video to demonstrate my painting process

an ambient demo, adding original sound design and minimal animations to increase immersion.

A lighting test, going for atmosphere here.

Through the recreation of these long-gone spaces, I hope that these cutesy itty bitty pixels encapsulated my childhood spaces, ones that I hold dear and close.
The project is a wholehearted invitation inside these worlds.
These homes, offices, roads,... all are and were filled to the brim and teeming with not just personal items,

but also memories, emotions, the energies and spirits of its inhabitants.
This could seem negative and sadness-inducing, but that’s not everything about this project.
Nostalgia can be heart-warming and joy-inducing, just as sadness can be enlivening.

For me and my own past, each time that I moved houses felt like severing a limb and changing it,
for a better, bigger, newer limb. But the thing is, I don't always want my better, bigger, more modern limbs.

I want my old limbs back and along with them the feelings and cherished memories.

I realized this was an in-dwelling desire to reconnect with my past and my roots.

I realized my memories have become in a way not the same, damaged,
and barely representing these past relics.
But as I’ve said stated before - my only wish was and still is to keep externalizing
my inner memories, and in this mortal lifetime, immortalize these withering memories.

Medium: pixel art + foam + print
Outcome: real-life pixel sets and objects
Year: 2023
Time spent: 90 days

Green Parks & Yellow Lights got a chance to step into the real world, after L’OFFICIEL Vietnam (a global fashion magazine) reached out to me, with a proposal to do a photoshoot where my pixel art would be shot together with a few luxury fashion products.

The official selected photos.

The assets I’ve created, in the digital space.

I was commissioned to create life-sized objects. I had to decide the physical dimensions of these things, test printed them out to get a feel for the scale, and then made 3D cubes out of glueing said foam pieces together. A huge degree of precision and pre-planning was required, as to minimize the production costs and time. That’s for the objects, but for the sets, I had to digitally plan out which objects or layers would occupy the foreground and background. Very fascinating to tinker with spatial awareness that created my original works and now calculating and speculating their real-life arrangements.

Behind the scenes of the photoshoot.

My work in the actual magazine issue.

I made these objects with love and attention, cutting the foam as close to the pixel art printed on it as I humanly could.
I got emotional seeing what I drew on a screen step out into real life as objects.
I also had quite the fun tinkering with that transition, and even more fun re-imagining iconic objects in pixel art,
like vases or teapots and cups (my personal favorite was the chiếu cói - Vietnamese sitting mat)

i'm just baffled that Green Parks & Yellow Lights got a chance to grow and evolve, and specifically step outside into the digital world.
This process provided me with a novel sense of appreciation for my own artworks, and just how far it has come from just an urge to draw my past to one day making them physical.

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Production Credits:

Pixel Art: by yours truly
Photographer: Monkey Minh
Set Design: Vu Nhat Dang Khoa
Assistant: Duy Đặng, Kevin Lc
Retouch: Trinh Trần

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