My Story

​ My family’s history is rooted in northern Vietnam, in Quan Phuong, in what is now Hai Hau District of Nam Dinh Province. In the sixteenth century, the region was known as Quan Anh and became one of the earliest places in Vietnam to encounter Christian missionaries. By 1638, Father Morelli had established a parish there, and Christianity gradually became part of the life of the community.  Among those early converts were my ancestors.  For more than three centuries, Catholic faith became part of my family’s history. Then, in 1954 Vietnam was divided, my grandparents and family left the North and moved south, leaving behind our ancestral home and generations of Catholic roots.  I was born in Saigon and raised in the south of Vietnam. Because of the political separation of North and South, I grew up never having seen the land from which my family came. Yet the North was always present in our home through my parent's stories of magnificent churches, Christian rituals, sacred objects, and a landscape where faith had been woven into everyday life.

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My parents have long since passed, but their stories remain vivid to me. Their love for the old churches and for Asian Christian art became part of my earliest memories.  I grew up in Cape Saint Jacques, now Vung Tau, surrounded by another spiritual world: Buddhist temples, monks, incense, offerings, and great golden Buddha statues. As a child, I often wandered into the temples and marveled at the abundance of fruit offerings left by pilgrims.  I did not yet understand that these two traditions—Christianity and Buddhism—were quietly shaping the way I would come to see art.  To me, spirituality was something that could be touched and seen.  It lived in the face of a Buddha, in the quiet presence of a Christian figure, in the architecture of a church, in the ritual of prayer, and in the hands of an artist who transformed wood, lacquer, gold, or pigment into something capable of carrying memory.  I remember the small early Christian statues kept at the private altar in our home. They were delicate and finely crafted, possessing a quiet beauty that invited contemplation. Very much like the Renaissance masterpieces of Europe that existed in books during my childhood, distant from the world I knew. Yet these small sacred figures brought another world into our home.  They awakened in me both a devotion to my faith and a lifelong love of art.  And somewhere within that childhood fascination was a wish: one day, I would travel north and see the home of my ancestors.  Many years later, I finally made that journey north.  I traveled not simply as a visitor, but as someone on a quest, searching for a part of herself—a daughter returning to the landscape preserved in her parents’ memories.

 

Ultimately, I found the churches I had imagined as a child.  Standing amid rice fields, narrow roads, villages, and the quiet rhythms of rural Vietnam, these extraordinary cathedrals seemed almost dreamlike. Their European architectural vocabulary—Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque—stood in striking contrast to the surrounding rice fields of Vietnam.  They were, in a sense, fragments of another world. Yet they were also unmistakably Vietnamese.  They had been built, inhabited, prayed in, protected, and preserved by generations of Vietnamese Catholics. Their architecture became a physical record of encounters between cultures, faiths, histories, and people.  As I traveled through the region, I began to understand that these churches were more than monuments. They were repositories of memory.  Many had suffered through neglect, war, political upheaval, and the passage of time. Others remained as remarkable witnesses to the endurance of faith and community. Many of the surviving churches date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which Catholic communities and architecture expanded significantly throughout Vietnam.  The journey allowed me to see, with my own eyes, the world that had existed in my parents’ stories. It also changed the way I understood Vietnamese art.

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Faith, Memory, and Art

​In June 1988, Pope John Paul II canonized 117 Vietnamese martyrs who had died during periods of Christian persecution by imperial authorities. They became known as the Martyrs of Vietnam, including the Martyrs of Tonkin and Annam.  The names themselves carry layers of history.  Tonkin was the historical name used for northern Vietnam, while Annam was another historical designation for Vietnam. These names belong to earlier chapters of the country’s complex history, but they remain part of the historical language surrounding Vietnamese Christianity.  For me, however, the story is not simply about Catholicism. It is about memory.  It is about what families carry with them when they leave their homeland. It is about the objects, images, architecture, rituals, and stories that survive when places can no longer be reached.  And it is about the extraordinary ability of art to preserve what time cannot.  This understanding became one of the foundations of Lisa Flowers Contemporary Asia.

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The Gallery

​The gallery grew from my desire to explore the beauty and complexity of Asian art through the lens of history, spirituality, craftsmanship, and human experience. My interest extends across traditions—not only the Catholic art that shaped my childhood, but also the Buddhist imagery, Vietnamese lacquer, sculpture, and contemporary works that reflect the many layers of Asian culture.  Lisa Flowers Contemporary Asia is therefore more than the culmination of a career or a collection.  It is the continuation of a personal journey.  A journey that began with a little girl in South Vietnam, surrounded by Buddhist temples and golden Buddhas, listening to stories of distant churches in the North.  A journey that led back to the ancestral land she had known only through memory.  And finally, a journey that became a gallery—a place where art can bring together memory and discovery, tradition and transformation, East and West, the sacred and the human.  Every piece of art has a story.  Every object carries traces of the hands, culture, history, and imagination that brought it into being.  My hope is that when someone enters Lisa Flowers| Contemporary Asia, they do not simply see art.

They feel something.

Perhaps a memory they did not know they carried.

Perhaps a connection to a culture they have never visited.

Perhaps simply a moment of quiet wonder.

For that is where my own journey began: with wonder, with memory, and with a longing to understand where I came from.