5 Questions with Viet-My Bui
Viet-My Bui is a Vietnamese-Australian artist and illustrator based in Naarm/Melbourne. With a focus on movement, organic lines and character-driven imagery, her work captures the fantastical and the feminine in luminous hues.
Recent group exhibitions include For The Deckade, Sorse Gallery (2024), Inspire Inclusion, Off The Kerb (2024), LOCALS, Outre Gallery (2024), and Gather Together, Long Gallery, Tasmania (2023).
Magical Girl is her debut solo exhibition.
From Magical Girl, ‘Can You Face Your True Feelings’, Viet-My Bui, 2024.
No.1
The Magical Girl—who is she, what kind of world does she live in, and how has she inspired the name of your debut solo show (congratulations!)?
(Thank you so much!) I knew from the beginning that I was going to make a show inspired by the mythos of the Magical Girl, and was using it as a placeholder name for several months. In the end, it just made sense to keep it simple.
The Magical Girl has always been a part of me. As a child, I often felt powerless and small. When retreating into my imagination, I manifested girls that appeared delicate but were in fact super powerful, capable and bad-ass.
The Magical Girl lives in a world unrestrained by structure or gravity; she has super strength, or telekinesis, or a magic transformation compact—take your pick; she is always seen with her animal familiar, her dearest friend and guide; she is pulled towards her true purpose. She is playful, vigilant and determined. She demonstrates softness in her strength. She resolutely takes up space. She has style and sass. She believes in her power and worthiness. She fights for what she believes in. Her world is multi-coloured, effervescent—and full of other Magical Beings from all walks of life that share the same destiny. There is an unspoken solidarity amongst them—no Magical Girl stands alone.
Ultimately, I think she represents the part of my childhood that has stayed with me.
No.2
What is your earliest memory of drawing, and how has your drawing practice and relationship with drawing changed over time?
I remember sitting at the communal craft table in kindergarten, drawing with a navy texta on light blue paper. I drew a girl with long hair, wearing a dress, a shining gem on her forehead. It was a Magical Girl, sitting astride a unicorn.
My earliest memories of drawing are filled with absolute delight and wonder. As a child, I was obsessed with drawing. I laboured over my characters, lovingly rendering details with my grey lead pencil. I drew prolifically, without any inhibition or fear. There was such sincerity and devotion to my artworks back then. I drew because it’s simply what I did. It was a compulsion, a directive from within.
As I grew older, my relationship with my parents—and with drawing—became more fraught. They were strict, unyielding, and vehemently opposed my desire to pursue art. Drawing became a source of conflict and pain, and by my early twenties, I had almost completely withdrawn from it. My practice became entangled with family trauma: for me, it symbolised autonomy, but for my parents, it felt like a rejection of family and tradition. For the next decade, I tiptoed around drawing, developing a dysfunctional relationship with it. It triggered guilt for not being the 'Good Vietnamese Daughter' and resentment for being unable to pursue the artist I wanted to be. I was also woefully self-critical, holding myself to impossible standards and constantly feeling crushed under the weight of my own relentless self-judgment.
It took ten years for me to finally reckon with the fact that not making art was diminishing my quality of life and my sense of self. So, I began to try salvaging my practice by building safety in making art again. In 2020 I began playing with a new medium and slowly, haltingly, found my way back to a place of nourishment.
No.3
What were some of the inspirations and guiding forces that led you to create this debut collection?
My creative journey has been shaped by emotional struggles and the lasting impact of personal trauma. [So] I wanted this collection to be a return to joy—the joy I feel in making art, and a reclamation of self through this process.
My wise friend Cat Rabbit once suggested that, in the face of a creative block, to think back to what inspired me to draw to begin with. For me, my earliest inspirations included anime and cartoons (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Evangelion, Cardcaptor Sakura, The Last Unicorn), Polly Pocket compacts, and console games like Street Fighter and Tekken.
I would download images and stills from a host of anime, arrange them in Microsoft Word, and print them out in black and white. I would then carefully cut them out and blu-tacked them to the inside of my shelf. Every day, I would stare reverently at these tiny greyscale images, admiring the artwork, the beauty of the lines, how alive the characters seemed, imagining what their lives were like. It was a formative experience.
This inspiration fuelled many drawings. I spent many hours by myself as a child, and was deeply immersed in my interior world. For this show, I wanted to somehow bottle up the magic I felt back then and transpose it onto the canvas.
No.4
Can you share more about what has drawn you towards these recurring visual themes in your work: cats, portraits of girlhood/femininity, with consistently impeccable fashions and lush, bold colourways?
I suppose I’ve always been interested in the concept of ‘becoming’. How does our family of origin form us? What micro decisions and pathways lead us to where we are today? Who will we be in a year, five years, ten years? How much reprogramming and unshedding must we do to uncover newer and truer versions of ourselves? What latent dreams lie underneath the noise? I equate the state of girlhood with transformation and possibility, as well as raw vulnerability. It can be such a tender and difficult time, wrestling with your identity whilst navigating the lines between external and internal feedback.
Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura definitely ignited my love of fashion and costume. How could I resist the allure of a sparkling transformation sequence that resulted in a stunning, gravity-defying dress, replete with frills and ribbons?! I believe clothing and character design go hand in hand. Clothes hold so much power in how you present yourself and curate your appearance. An outfit can tell you a story about the wearer.
Colour, incidentally, came later to me. I drew exclusively in black and white throughout my early years, afraid of adding colour to my delicately drawn lines. Now, the colours of an artwork are the most important element to me! Perhaps it was an unconscious thing, but as I began to return to my art practice in recent years, I had a yearning for something bright and nostalgic. There is something so sincere about bold colours. A palette can totally shift the mood of an artwork, and it’s important to me to strike an emotional chord with my pieces.
And cats! In 2022, I adopted a black smoke tabby. Her name is Sương Mù, or Mumu for short. She is my little spirit guardian companion. My soul cat. She reminds me everyday to revel in the moment—to bask in the joy of life and to be present. To love her is so easy and to be loved by her is a privilege. She is an ever-present force in my life, so it made sense for her to appear in my works, too.
No.5
Across various interviews (including your Liminal interview #17), you have been courageous and generously transparent about how challenging, long and winding the journey has been for you in your creative practice. How does it feel to be where you are now?
It is kind of you to say that, as I'm always worried about being TMI! However, I feel there is power in owning your story and telling it. The articulation of your journey might just be the thing that helps someone else feel less isolated on their own.
Navigating this first solo has been tumultuous: confronting my insecurities on an intimate level and pushing through them to reach towards creativity. Over the past several months, I was plagued with fears of failure, disappointing others, making an unremarkable body of work, being too basic, etc—my usual wheelhouse as someone with anxiety and depression. You, Kim, had to remind me that my one job for this show was to enjoy myself. Then I imagined creating a show that would delight the child version of me. I imagined holding her hand and walking her into the space, watching her eyes light up in amazement.
Along the way, I realised that it became something of a healing journey. Magical Girl is a love letter to my inner child artist—letters to the six-year-old, 12-year-old, 17-year-old, 21-year-old versions of myself—that just wanted to be seen and told that she was enough. So much has changed since that interview, and there has been a lot of growth and introspection in the intervening years. I am rebuilding something new with my parents. I texted my dad the flyer to my show and he said, ‘Hình đẹp! Good!’ I think he might come to the opening.
It feels momentous to release this collection. It has been a cyclical journey: to come full circle and arrive at the beginning. This debut show is something of a coming-of age-story, a personal renaissance. The realisation that I had the magic within myself all along.
Find out more
Magical Girl is a revelry in the magic of creating art. The collection draws from the artist’s childhood, when mark-making was an experience filled with unbridled joy—sketching superpowered heroines, designing elaborate costumes, and being immersed in worlds unknown. A bright and bold dreamscape, festooned with magical girls and their faithful familiars, this collection radiates a sense of play, delight, and a celebration of personal transformation.
The exhibition runs from 24 Oct to 7 Nov at Off the Kerb, with the opening on 25 Oct (Fri), 6-8PM. More details here.