Bụi

The work presents two layers side by side. In front: a small physical altar table holding a few domestic objects, lit softly, familiar in scale and material. Behind it: a large screen showing 3D Gaussian splat reconstructions of ritual spaces photographed in Vietnam, rendered in a painterly and dissolving visual style.

Gaussian splats are generated from photographs and produce a quality that sits somewhere between a watercolour and a photograph. The geometry is incomplete by nature: edges dissolve, surfaces shimmer, some areas hold detail while others fall apart entirely. The palette is warm and dark: incense smoke, tungsten light, aged ceramic, shadow. The screen, or projection, appears as something between a window and a fog. The physical table in front gives the viewer something to stand at, something to look across, before looking through the window.

The camera within the digital layer does not move dramatically. It holds still or shifts only slightly in response to the viewer's presence. The Gaussian splat environments slowly cross-fade between scenes: a kitchen altar, a bowl of fruit offerings, the steam rising from a cup of tea. An author's voice tells her family's ritual story, in Vietnamese and English, close and personal, not explanatory.

This work matters because it challenges an unspoken assumption in digital heritage work: that heritage worth capturing is monumental, public, and already sanctioned as significant. A family altar in a diaspora household rarely gets that treatment, yet ancestor worship in Vietnamese family life carries the same weight of memory and transmission, even though it's usually private, undocumented, and passed down through hands and habit rather than instruction.

Bụi / Dust brings that into a gallery without smoothing it into a museum-ready version of heritage or pretending to fully explain it, which matters for anyone whose cultural inheritance is partial or interrupted by migration. It also proposes a different way to use 3D capture and volumetric reconstruction, tools usually built for extraction, by using them here with restraint instead, keeping the instability rather than correcting it. That's a model for digital heritage practice that holds sensitive material with care rather than flattening it for consumption or the archival record. More broadly, it treats ethics as a methodology in itself, not something added after the fact, which is still a real gap in current XR and intangible heritage research.

Nhu Bui is a Vietnamese artist, designer, researcher and educator based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works across 3D interactive media and digital design with a focus on cultural memory, diaspora, and intangible heritage. Her practice draws on autoethnographic methods and emerging capture technologies to explore what is lost, preserved, and transformed across migration. She is currently completing a PhD in Digital Design at RMIT University and teaches in the Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity program.

Nhu Bui's practice explores how extended reality can become a vessel for cultural memory, transforming intangible heritage into lived, embodied experiences. Her earlier augmented reality works, Bánh Chưng AR, Moonlight AR, and Lost Folk AR, reimagined Vietnamese food-making traditions, festival rituals, oral storytelling, and folk art for audiences separated from these practices by migration, distance, or time. These projects form the foundation of her ongoing PhD research into the preservation of everyday Vietnamese heritage, which moves across two seemingly contrasting yet deeply connected spaces: the street vendor and the family altar. One exists in the public rhythms of the city; the other within the intimate rituals of the home. Together, they reveal how culture is sustained not through monuments and museums, but through ordinary acts of care, labour, memory, and devotion. The work presented in this exhibition centres on the family altar, a reconstruction of Vietnamese domestic ritual space through volumetric capture, interactivity, and spatial storytelling. Nhu invites audiences to consider what is lost when everyday cultural practices disappear, and what new forms of remembrance become possible when heritage is translated into immersive experience.