Mai Man
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 4 min read
Mai Man is a Vietnamese art director and stylist based in London. Her work explores cultural memory, highlighting food, clothing, and gestures as means of sharing stories. Influenced by her childhood in Vietnam and her life overseas, she views these elements as both personal and communal. In her ongoing project Ăn ngon mặc đẹp (Eat well, dress well), she looks at how cooking and eating influence our perceptions and memories. By turning daily habits into images, she connects the feeling of home with new surroundings.
Q: Your work often circles around belonging and identity. What keeps those themes alive for you?
A: Belonging and identity are things that I've always been interested in. Moving from a small city in Vietnam and studying/living in the UK for around 4 years now, I have been constantly negotiating where I fit and how culture shapes the way I see. Vietnam has a very broad culture from North to South, even in my family my dad is from the North and my mom is Ede people (a minority ethnic group in the Central Highlands of Vietnam). I was fortunate to see and experience the diversity among two sides of my family. Since I moved to the UK to study, I started to adapt to the lifestyle here which is somewhat different from my life in Vietnam, but I still keep some same habits in order to feel connected to my family back home. In this project, I made it as a way to reflect on that moment to honour the parts of myself that feel rooted and to understand the side that is still searching. The tension between those states continues to inspire me.
Q: Food and shared meals appear again and again in your images. What draws you to that space of comfort and tension?
A: Food has always been a language of care in Vietnamese culture: it's how we express love, nostalgia and also hold the culture’s complexity: the rituals of cooking, the act of sharing and the small details that hold histories.
I am particularly drawn to those contrasts, especially when I live far from home now. I pay more attention to how the food is made and the slight differences in the way of cooking among different cities of Vietnam. I have a group of Vietnamese friends in the UK and we usually hang out and cook for each other. These meals make us understand each other’s hometown through how we made the food, and sharing meals makes us connect more, especially since we are all far from home. Through food, I can explore memory and belonging in a way that feels intimate for me but also universal.
Q: Living between Vietnam and the UK, do you ever feel caught between two visual languages?
A: Of course, but I've learned to take the “in-between” as my creative source. My heritage gives me stories, textures, rhythms, everything feels alive and sensory. While in the UK, it offers me distance and reflection, it allows me to analyse my heritage from a different perspective. I'm able to be friends with and see different cultures in London, and I’m surprised when I realise there are some small similarities between my foreign friends’ culture and mine. It gives me the curiosity to look deeper into my heritage and also look at it with a fresher eye. My visual language exists where those two worlds meet, it's less about choosing one and more about letting both speak through me.
Q: You move between mediums like painting, photography, and installation. What makes you choose one over another?
A: I believe each medium offers a different way to translate and express your stories and emotions. For me, photography wasn't my strength but it allows me to capture the moment as I wanted in my head.
I am now more leaning toward installation or experience events where I can combine different media in one place to invite people into the world I am creating.
For this project, I have made a small event: decorated with images and some props that remind of Vietnam street food culture, Vietnam street sounds as the music background and served the food that appeared in my project (images attached below). Sharing meals is a way that Vietnamese people express care, build relationships and create a community. Making this event is also a way to open my community not only with my other Viet friends but so other cultures in the UK can experience it too. Sometimes, only images aren't enough, I want to give people the whole experience with food, sounds and the atmosphere.
Q: When you think about home now, is it still a place, or more of a feeling that shows up in your work?
A: Until now, I have lived in the UK for 4 years and occasionally visit home every summer for about a month. Home is now less a physical place and more like an emotional place for me. Every time I go back home I discover something new from my mom's heritage or from my dad's library that can be used as an inspiration for future projects. I find home in the act of creating. When I create, I reconnect with my family and with myself that feel scattered across places and childhood memories. I want to explore more about the culture in my hometown and potentially create more works inspired by that. I'm trying to make my works keep those fragments together, it's a way to carry home with me and share my home with everyone else.
