After almost 3  decades of making work  and living in Vietnam, I began to notice a gradual change in the Vietnamese urban scape . The parks and public spaces where couples once found moments of closeness seemed increasingly empty. At home, privacy can be difficult when several generations share the same rooms. In their place are discreet sex hotels: anonymous rooms rented by the hour, temporary interiors where intimacy can be purchased and briefly protected from the outside world. I began photographing these spaces as rooms of desire, but also as rooms of aspiration and privilege, appearing at a moment when Vietnam is moving rapidly toward a new economic and social reality.

  The hotels themselves reveal a hierarchy of fantasy. In working-class establishments, a room may contain little more than a bed, a sex couch, and inexpensive paintings on the wall. As the price rises, the rooms become increasingly elaborate—opulent, theatrical, and fantastic, transforming intimacy into an imagined world that can be rented for a few hours. I am interested in what these rooms reveal about desire, privilege, and the meeting of Vietnamese colonial past and its present . What do we inherit, and what do we invent? How much of sexual fantasy carries the traces of colonial histories and images arriving from elsewhere, and is there, alongside them, an erotic imagination that belongs distinctly to Vietnam? These rooms become thresholds between public and private, East and West, concealment and fantasy, an inherited past and a future still being invented.