I started by sitting down with other Khmer people around my age. We talked about our families, our upbringings, and the struggles our elders carried as refugees from the Khmer Rouge.

These conversations were intimate and personal, often emotional. At the end of each one, I asked my peers to share a photograph of the elder who raised them. Those photographs became the foundation of the project.
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I wanted a medium that could capture the scale of these conversations. Memories don’t feel small—they feel vivid and monumental. Projection mapping became my way of representing that scale. I cast the family photographs as large as I could, letting them fill the entire frame. In many of the images, the living subject appears small beside their elder, a reflection of how memory and legacy continue to shape us.I chose black and white for its clarity and contrast. It heightened the geometries created by the projections, and it brought a sense of awe and timelessness to the images.

The final photographs became spaces for reflection—moments where the presence of a descendant and the memory of their elder coexist.

I shared the work with participants and their families, and their reactions were deeply meaningful. For many, these images weren’t just photographs; they were acts of honoring, remembering, and preserving.

Directing this project was as personal as it was creative.

I often found myself emotional during the process, because these stories weren’t abstract—they were my own, too. The project made me think carefully about how to represent feeling through visuals, and how to approach subject matter with the respect it deserves.

It reminded me that art direction is more than aesthetics—it’s about guiding mood, meaning, and sensitivity. This project reaffirmed for me that visuals can be both personal and communal, holding memory in a way that words sometimes cannot.