VIETNAM, Y3K — FLORA Museum Challenge

For the FLORA Museum Challenge, I chose the Incense Burner with Dragon Spout, a Vietnamese artifact from the 1st–3rd century in The Met’s collection ( https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/53862 ), and reimagined it through a Y3K lens.

I wanted to connect an ancient object with a familiar image of Vietnam today: a woman riding a scooter. The dragon-shaped incense burner became a futuristic chrome vehicle, while traditional Vietnamese clothing and the conical hat were transformed into synthetic future wear.

I built the entire visual world in FLORA, from the clothing and accessories to the dragon scooter, environments, stills, and final video. Using AI as a world building tool, the project imagines how Vietnamese visual culture might evolve into another timeline while still carrying traces of its past.