Heaven and Earth is a somber ponderance on death and grief in the woods on the backdrop of diaspora - of one’s deep yearning to make sense of a fundamental paradigm of life in an ungrounding exilic context of having no roots so far away from a (real) home, while also dealing with the palpable loss that echoes through the vastness of space and time - across both the physical distance and time passed.
The series frames the process of grieving in a setting devoid of all signage of longing in the cultural framework, where one's unraveling has to stretch beyond the boundaries of culture, geography, and the intangibility of grief - being devoid of all cultural paradigm and iconography that are so integral to our coping process.
Removed from all senses of longing and cultural significances, Heaven and Earth (re)imagines a heaven on earth in a reality pure and untarnished by humans. In the woods that is almost entirely devoid of the human footprint altogether, death is not framed as an immediate singular loss, but more as an initiation in the process of decay, of breaking down and giving back all that we were to the next layer preceding it, of the circle of life and of reincarnation.
The idea of a heavenly plane of existence, after all, is perhaps only an imposition of our own worldly structures and desires, while coercing an overly simplified sense of morality into a singular point of ending. Heaven in the Vietnamese translation assumes an all powerful hierarchical standing above all, as is signified with the sky or the universe; while earth is where the layman resides, of a banal becoming - a state beneath or consequentially prior to ascension.
Heaven and Earth, therein, engages in a slowly subsuming first person perspective - a slow suture into a synergetic coexistence of earth and heaven on the same plane. It drafts an arch where the sky slowly entrances and consumes the earth, thus becoming inseparable. Heaven and Earth, in the end (or the beginning), have always existed together in a fragile tandem, where one necessitates the other in a circle where there’s neither a beginning nor an end.