‘Thơ gạo gió (a poem that scrapes away the wind)’ disrupts the conscious, unconscious and implicit biases that pervade tropical neurasthenia (Tropical madness) and the French Neoclassical paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, such as ‘The Turkish bath’, through skin scraping.

Gạo gio (skin scraping) is an East Asian healing technique. A small, smooth-edged tool is used to stroke, or scrape, a person’s skin to unblock energy and treat fevers and heat exhaustion. Within this image, my Aunty Kim scrapes the Vietnamese word mát, meaning both ‘cool’ and ‘mad’, onto her sister’s back. Relief is found in close family intimacy and in keeping cool amid the madness of racial stereotyping, objectification and fetishising.