Minimal Prayer

Minimal Prayer is a poetic exploration of spirituality and worship through a speculative sci-fi lens. In this imagined future, religion is banned, yet people continue to create personal altars from whatever materials they can find. These objects, assembled from mixed iconography, ready-mades, and salvaged symbols, reflect improvised belief systems shaped by censorship, misinformation, and cultural migration. Inspired by East-Asian futurism, the project reimagines Vietnam. A country often viewed through the lens of its war-torn past. Now, as a site of spiritual adaptation and quiet resistance. One work from the series, “Altar of Integration”, draws on my family’s early years in Norway. We were placed with a Christian host family—kind and well-meaning, but with strong missionary intentions. Though we practiced Vietnamese folk religion and Buddhism, we attended Baptist church every Sunday. This blending of belief. Part accommodation, part erasure - mirrored the wider pressures of assimilation and cultural survival, and became a form of quiet negotiation between identity, adaptation, and spiritual autonomy. I grew up between religions, yet gradually became atheist. Returning to Vietnam as an adult altered my perspective on faith. I became drawn to the subtle, everyday ways people engage with spirituality. As tradition struggles to keep up with technology and growth, Minimal Prayer asks: how do we preserve spiritual identity in a future that may not allow it, and what does belief look like when it’s improvised? Finally, it poses a question to the Vietnamese diasporic descendants: How can we achieve a deeper understanding of one another?