Thay Dung, now in his sixties and retired, is a self-taught artist in multiple media who is originally from Vietnam. He lives in Worcester and has built quite a following in crafting circles in Central Massachusetts over the last several years. Dung focuses now on making etchings on wood and bamboo, by burning small lines into the surface to create line drawing designs such as the phoenix and the dragon. These hark back to his Vietnamese heritage, of which he is quite proud. This art form is called pryrography. Dung’s other craft activities include pointillism works and glass engraving. Beyond even this, he makes earrings, bookmarks, key chains – and decorated walking sticks! He takes commissions and does customized work. Dung’s business card informs viewers: he does not speak a lot of English but he hopes “to communicate with others, share love and spread knowledge” through his artworks. This is a common theme among Refugee Artisans of Worcester: they make their crafts to widen the circles of human interaction today and to tie buyer and crafter together through affection. To those ends Dung has taught pyrography for three years at the Worcester Senior Center on Providence Street.
In a 2022 communication with Joan Kariko of RAW, Dung’s daughter Tina described her father’s walking sticks and the profound symbolism he sees there in their burnt-etchings. In Tina’s exact words,
“Bamboo in our culture represents the resilience in oneself, despite the winds and storms, and over time it can only get stronger. It represents an honorable man at war, and bravery. It also symbolizes a woman with an indominable spirit. Surrounding the bamboo stick is the Dragon bearing the Phoenix tail. In ancient stories and myths, Vietnamese people are descended from a dragon and a fairy. The dragon now symbolizes the pride of Vietnamese people, the prosperity and nobility that one may wish to have. Phoenix is one out of four royal animals in Vietnamese Culture. We often describe the beauty and elegance of a woman as the phoenix is. In Vietnamese tales, the phoenix symbolizes the sun, virtues, elegance, and immortality. That is why the artwork is so important to my father because its meanings evoke the pathways that can give us a deep sense to acknowledge the world beyond our reality. He encourages us to seek for an understanding that all of these characteristics have long existed in our soul. The dragon with a phoenix tail also manifest the concept of yin and yang. Over all, his hope for his art is to evoke meaning beyond pour current perception of life.”
