Bụi / Dust · 2026 Project website & exhibition enquiries

A Mixed-Reality Installation

Bụi

/ Dust

Bụi / Dust places a physical Vietnamese altar table in the gallery beside a screen showing Gaussian splat reconstructions of ritual spaces in Saigon: edges dissolving, surfaces shimmering, coherent only from certain angles before breaking into fragments. A bilingual voiceover, drawn from the artist's own memories of incense and fruit offerings, plays alongside.

Bùi Quỳnh Như

Naarm / Melbourne · Practice-led doctoral research

Enquire about exhibiting

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.

Incense burning in a ceramic vessel on the family altar

Incense on the altar, Ho Chi Minh City

The Installation

A hybrid physical-digital environment

The altar table and screen installed at Abbotsford Convent

The altar and the screen behind it, installed at Abbotsford Convent. Overhead lighting removed; the viewer approaches into a pool of warm, dim light.

01 · Altar & Objects

What is on the table

Yellow osmanthus flowers, a five-fruit offering plate (mâm ngũ quả), unlit incense, candles, an agarwood-oil vessel, Western biscuits, the same kinds of objects that appear in the fieldwork footage. Flowers and fruit are real and refreshed through the run; the artist tends the altar throughout the exhibition as an extension of the practice rather than a performance of it.

02 · Digital Layer

Gaussian-splat reconstructions

Scenes generated from fieldwork video and stills (via Polycam and Apple's on-device splat pipeline) render in real time in a Unity build: the kitchen altar, the fruit table, the incense vessels, steam rising from an offering of tea. Scenes cross-fade slowly, every 45–90 seconds, dissolving into and through one another rather than cutting.

03 · Interaction

A camera that notices you

A webcam mounted at the display tracks the viewer's face locally, with no network dependency. The in-scene camera drifts a few degrees toward them: never navigational, never explorable. Earlier versions allowed free movement through the scenes; viewers began hunting for glitches instead of staying with the work. Constraint is a curatorial and ethical choice as much as a formal one.

04 · Audio

Two channels, two intimacies

An ambient soundscape of the family home, motorbikes, street voices, kitchen sounds, plays at low volume through the display's speakers into the gallery. A bilingual Vietnamese/English voiceover, in nine movements (18–20 minutes, looping), is routed separately to wired headphones beside the altar. Vietnamese passages are left untranslated.

05 · Fieldnotes

What hangs from the ceiling

Long sheets of A0 translucent paper hang around the altar, printed with fragments of the artist's own fieldnotes and family stories in Vietnamese and English. Visitors move between them the way one might move through a house of half-remembered rooms, reading passages that were never fully theirs to read. Light and shadow pass through the paper as bodies come close to it, so the text becomes as unstable as the splats behind the altar: legible from some angles, lost from others.

Fieldwork Capture

Renders from the fieldwork capture

Gaussian-splat render of the family kitchen altar, Ho Chi Minh City — Gaussian-splat render · kitchen altar

Gaussian-splat render of offering table detail — Gaussian-splat render · offering table, detail

Gaussian-splat render of incense and fruit offering — Gaussian-splat render · incense & fruit offering

Gaussian-splat render of the altar cabinet and ancestor photograph — Gaussian-splat render · altar cabinet

Gaussian-splat render of incense vessels and tea cups — Gaussian-splat render · incense vessels & tea

Gaussian-splat render of the kitchen table, alternate angle — Gaussian-splat render · kitchen table, alternate view

Gaussian-splat render of fruit and flowers on the altar — Gaussian-splat render · fruit & flowers

Gaussian-splat render, close detail — Gaussian-splat render · detail

Gaussian-splat render, wide view of the altar room — Gaussian-splat render · wide view

01 / 09

The Voiceover

Nine movements, in two languages

Recorded in the artist's own voice, in Vietnamese and English, without translation between them. The full 18–20 minute recording is available to listen to below.

Movement One

The Name

The discovery of a great-grandmother's name, decades into looking at her photograph.

Movement Two

Four in the Morning

The grandmother's pre-dawn ritual, begun alone, without ceremony or witness.

III

Movement Three

The Flower Debate

An argument over yellow osmanthus versus marigold, settled by a phone search.

Movement Four

The Kitchen

Đủ chưa. Is it enough: the question asked every year, with no fixed answer.

Movement Five

The Frame

What the camera asks to be shown, and what the ritual actually is underneath.

Movement Six

Incense, Smoke, Street

The atmosphere that cannot travel. What bụi, dust, means.

VII

Movement Seven

What My Hands Don't Know

Knowledge that lives in an aunt's hands, not yet in the artist's own.

VIII

Movement Eight

Tuỳ Con (Optional)

Ritual as choice, not obligation, in a family living across distance.

Listen

Sound & voiceover

The gallery-ready mix that fills the installation space at low volume: motorbike traffic, kitchen sounds, the dense acoustic layering of a house on an urban Vietnamese street. This plays through the display speakers; the separate bilingual voiceover, below, is reserved for headphones on site.

Gallery Mix · Ambient soundscape

Voiceover · Nine movements, Vietnamese & English

For Presenters

Technical rider

A summary for exhibition and festival programmers. A full technical document is available on request.

Floor plan of the Bụi / Dust installation footprint

Installation floor plan, for venue and bump-in planning.

Footprint	Approx. 250 cm deep × 150–200 cm wide, viewer-facing. Domestic-scale altar table (≈60 × 40 × 45–60 cm) plus 32" display on plinth, positioned ≈40 cm behind the altar.
Lighting	Overhead lighting removed above the installation footprint. The work depends on low ambient light: the splat's void background should register as near-black. Adjacent-work light spill managed with drapes if needed.
Power / AV	One power outlet. Render unit (concealed beneath the altar table) driving the display via HDMI, plus a USB audio interface for headphone output. Wired headphones on a hook beside the table. A standard USB webcam at the top of the display for face tracking (works locally, no network required).
Artist-supplied	Altar table (collapsible trestle structure for transport), all altar objects, agarwood oil, render build, headphones, take-home participatory materials (offering cards, vellum prints, folded completion cards).
Venue-supplied	32" display (or equivalent) and plinth, one power circuit, ability to remove/adjust overhead lighting for the installation zone, fresh flowers and fruit sourced locally through the run (guidance provided).
Duration	Continuous loop, no fixed beginning or end. Voiceover: 18–20 minutes across nine movements. Visual cross-fades: 45–90 seconds per scene.
Maintenance	Altar requires regular attention through the run (flower and fruit replenishment, headphone hygiene, participatory-element restocking). The artist tends the altar in person where possible; a maintenance guide is provided otherwise.
Access notes	No touch interaction with altar objects (indicated by a brief wall note). Face-tracking interaction requires no instruction, gesture, or accessibility accommodation to experience: presence alone is sufficient.
Install / transport	Altar table disassembles for transport. Estimated bump-in: half a day for a single presenter familiar with the Unity build and audio routing.

Exhibition History

Previously Exhibited

2026

Somewhere, Elsewhere, Now, Here

Group exhibition · Abbotsford Convent, Naarm / Melbourne

Exhibited in a dedicated alcove with overhead lighting removed and surrounding walls draped to manage ambient light. Viewers consistently spent several minutes at the installation, reading the stories printed on A0 translucent paper hung from the ceiling, and reported feeling deeply moved; several returned on later days, including with family members. Vietnamese-Australian visitors reported specific recognition, "that is exactly how that argument goes," rather than a general sense of cultural familiarity. The artist also received heartfelt feedback from visitors of other backgrounds, including Singaporean, Malaysian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Sri Lankan, and Australian, who reflected on their own culture, identity, home, and belonging after viewing the work.

Ongoing

Further presentations

Galleries · Festivals · XR & digital-heritage programmes

The artist is actively seeking further exhibition and festival opportunities for Bụi / Dust, and looking at ways to evolve the installation for different audiences and contexts. This includes a return presentation in Ho Chi Minh City, to test how the work's framing of distance and partiality reads for audiences who share the practice rather than encounter it from diaspora. Future iterations will also explore sensory design, including scent, lighting, and projection mapping, to deepen the immersiveness of the experience; the specific approach will depend on the affordances of each site.

Documentation

Installation views, Abbotsford Convent, 2026

Installation view, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Now, Here, Abbotsford Convent, 2025 — Abbotsford Convent, 2025

Installation view, Abbotsford Convent, 2025 — Abbotsford Convent, 2025

Broadsheet wall text and altar table, Abbotsford Convent, 2025 — Broadsheet & altar table, Abbotsford Convent

01 / 17

Documentation

From the gallery floor

Short, casual clips shot during the install and the run at Abbotsford Convent: visitors at the altar, the build going up the day before, small moments that don't fit anywhere else on this page.

Setting up, the morning of install

The screen, mid cross-fade

Visitors at the altar

Testing the splat render on site

The full setup, altar and screen together

Unpacking the installation

Significance

What counts as heritage

Why This Matters

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.

"Bụi means dust. It also means what remains after burning, what drifts, what cannot be held but cannot quite be gotten rid of either. What settles on surfaces, is wiped away, and returns."

Voiceover, Movement IX

The Artist

Bùi Quỳnh Như

Designer, Researcher, Daughter, Grand-daughter

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.

"If traditions continue to evolve, migrate, and transform, where does heritage truly reside: in places, objects, rituals, or the people who carry them forward?"

Artist Statement

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.

For exhibition & festival enquiries

Nhu Bui welcomes enquiries from galleries, festivals, and digital-heritage programmes interested in presenting Bụi / Dust. Get in touch for the full technical rider, high-resolution stills, or to discuss adapting the installation to a specific space.

nhu.bui@rmit.edu.au

Nhu Bui · Naarm / Melbourne, Australia

nhubui.myportfolio.com

academics.rmit.edu.au/nhu-bui

Acknowledgements

With thanks

To my grandmother

To my grandmother (Bà nội), for waking at four in the morning every year. For the knowledge in your hands that lives in mine, in some form, however partial.

To my family

To my family: my mother, father, sister, grandparents, my aunts, uncles, cousins, and extended family, near and far, for making home possible in two places at once, and for everything that is carried between them. So that I can move between two homes and still be tethered to both. That carrying is work, and it's rarely named. And for the table of food always filling, somehow, every year.

Contributor & Collaborator

Lucian Rodriguez Lovell, for the continuing support in this journey, technically and mentally.

Supervisors

Chris Barker, Li Ping, and Jonathan Duckworth, for ongoing conversations, wisdom, patience, and rigour, for the long view, and for trusting in my potential and ideas from the very beginning.

Other Mentions

Friends and colleagues at MAGI and RMIT, for ongoing and continuing support.

This work is for my great-grandmother, Nguyễn Thị Kiểu. Paternal great-grandmother. Whom I never met. Whose name I now know.