Da Nang gave me a flash language that could move between paper, walls, motorbikes, courtyards and the people around the residency.
The city entered through the flash sheets
Da Nang did not arrive in the work as a scenic background. It came through the things I kept looking at: fish, dogs, chairs, lamps, motorbikes, food, creatures, signs and the way objects gathered around daily life.
The flash sheets became a way to hold those observations without turning them into a literal illustration of the city. A drawing could stay strange and personal while still carrying the pressure of the place where it was made.
A wall is a social surface
The murals changed the speed of the residency. A drawing that had been private could become part of a courtyard, a shared wall or a working space where other people had their own reasons to be present.
Painting alongside other people made the image less protected. The wall had to answer to its surroundings, to the people moving around it and to the practical conditions of making work in public.
The objects stayed in the language
I kept returning to ordinary objects because they already carried relationships. A chair is not only a chair when it belongs to a room, a family, a business or a street. A motorbike is not only a shape when it is part of how a city moves.
The flash practice let those objects sit beside animals, bodies and symbols without deciding which category mattered most. That is part of why the Da Nang drawings still move between tattoos, paintings and walls.
What I brought back
I brought back a larger sense of how a visual language can travel without becoming a logo. The creatures and symbols remained recognisably mine, but the place changed their neighbours, their scale and the situations in which they could appear.
I keep Da Nang as one residency project with shared murals, flash drawings and site records. The archive is not a travel diary. It is evidence of what the city allowed the work to become.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona field note based on confirmed Da Nang residency drawings, murals and process documentation.