DORCHESTER, MA — Ngọc-Trân ​​Vũ has always used art as a medium to share stories about her identity as a Vietnamese immigrant living in America. When she accepted the opportunity to create a mural themed around Vietnamese culture and stories on the side of a Vietnamese-owned building housing Phở Hòa, a Fields Corner staple, she got the entire community involved.

“I was just in my neighborhood sitting at the cafe by Phở Hòa,” says Vũ. “I was talking to the owner, Tam, a fellow artist. I was like, ‘I’d love to do some kind of creative projects,’ and he was like, well, ‘please consider my building as like your canvas.’ ”

From there, Vũ secured a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts and hired members of all ages within the community to form a steering committee to help her hear authentic stories and weave these narratives seamlessly into her art.

The Viet Stories mural, which was finished in 2017, is still there. Its message celebrates Vietnamese culture and history through three themes of “highlighting the cultural narrative, unity and growth.” The mural depicts a scene of a folktale, read from the bottom to the top, about being an American and a Vietnamese immigrant.

Kathy Le, Vũ’s student assistant, described the ideas and meanings behind the mural.

“As immigrants, we have been called boat people, hence why there’s a mother and a son on a boat,” she explained. “They’re trying to escape the war, right? So being displaced. And to that idea, we look upwards.”

Next to them are koi fish, a symbolism of good, climbing up the waterfall to become a dragon, taking a potentially bad path. This symbolizes the hardship of displacement and reaching prosperity as an immigrant or refugee. The globe towards the top symbolizes the happier, prosperous future of the American dream. The idea of the tree, Statue of Liberty, and the book with the number 75, is meant to suggest that immigrants must hold on to their roots to look to the future. The number 75 is important in Vietnamese culture, as it represents the year, 1975, that many refugees came to the U.S. as a result of being displaced by the U.S. war on South Vietnam.

When she is not working on a large collaborative community project, the typical day in ​​Vũ’s life consists of working remotely as the director of communications for the Brooklyn nonprofit UPROSE, a grassroots organization focused on sustainability. She attends meetings and teaches art classes. Vũ draws ideas and inspiration for her pieces from the community.

Vũ balances her hectic schedule and her passion for community work through motivation.

“The day job provides me that stability, and then my art career provides me that creative outlet and for me to really pursue what I want to do in collaboration with communities,” she said.

Vũ was born in Vietnam and came to the U.S. with her family as a political refugee. She grew up with her four siblings and parents in Dorchester and South Boston. Vũ’s identity as a Vietnamese American immigrant has shaped her worldview — and her art.

“It’s definitely a huge part of how I see the world, my framework, my lived experience,” she explained. Vu embeds themes of identity, heritage, the Vietnamese diaspora, and what it means to be Vietnamese American.

As a child, Vũ observed the disparities between her community and more privileged communities, but did not have the language to express her thoughts or the proper tools to make significant change. As an adult, she is able to work more actively in her community and share her struggles through themes and messages in her art.

Since Vũ was a child, art has been “her favorite thing to do” as something she can “just get lost in” and a skill that always came naturally to her. When an art teacher recommended she take up classes at a local community center, Vũ was initially hesitant to enroll due to financial and time constraints. However, once the teacher helped her apply for a program scholarship and convinced her father to help with transportation, she began to take classes.

“That was what really launched me into this journey of really working on my art, and then also understanding that there’s funding support for it, even if my family can’t afford it,” said Vũ.

Vũ moved to New York City to attend college. She received her MA in Arts and Politics at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and later her BA in Ethnic Studies and Visual Arts at Brown University. Several years ago, she left New York to return to her home community.

“I always envisioned myself coming back to my community,” she explained. “There was just so much happening that I wasn’t able to hear myself think or even have time for my own arts practice. So it felt like the right timing to head back to Boston.”

In addition to her educational pursuits, Vũ has been active within the Boston community and its art scene. She has collaborated with ArtPlace America, the Boston Children’s Museum, MASS MoCA, Assets for Artists, and the Heritage Museums & Gardens. She currently teaches several art-related workshops on storytelling, digital marketing, financial literacy, housing strategies for artists, and most recently taught as an adjunct professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Despite her busy schedule with work and art, she continues to remain active and involved in the Dorchester community. She has been a member of the Asian American Resources Workshop and still collaborates with them on arts and creative projects, most recently with the “Who Belongs Here? Who Doesn’t” event this past September.

With the Viet Stories mural, Vũ wanted to encapsulate what Vietnamese culture means to the community. That’s why she turned her art piece into a collaborative community effort, inviting a multigenerational panel of community residents to create an accurate and meaningful dialogue around Vietnamese stories.

“I wanted to really create a process that the community is a part of, for and by them, that highlights local kinds of stories and really creates a different narrative that oftentimes we don’t hear around, especially the Dorchester community, in the media,” explained Vũ.

Vũ’s efforts to include the community within the mural did not go unnoticed. Much of the community felt grateful to have their voices heard and be included in such an important project in the heart of what is known as Boston’s Little Saigon. “Most of her work is political but it’s in a graceful political way where she wants to give spotlight to the community, so she’s always in the right neighborhood for it too,” said Le. “So for her to reach out, and the way that she’s placed in this neighborhood and everything, played out very well for her.”

To gather community awareness and involvement for the mural, Vũ and her team set days aside to go door knocking around Fields Corner. As one house on one street opened up, and then two on another street, and eventually house after house as word spread fast, the project quickly came to fruition. Vũ also had many friends and acquaintances in the area, and connections to the media with a local radio station she previously worked at. “She did a really amazing job with reaching out and it was so influential,” said Le.

Vũ’s previous experience as a youth leader helped inform her decisions to create a council and guided her creative processes as well as funding. She wanted input and assistance from all walks of life in the Vietnamese community. To accommodate everyone involved, Vũ set up meetings for all participants to get to know each other and communicated work dates to everyone, and included financial compensation from the grant as she knew that the job would be time-consuming. She took many steps to assure her project was accessible and doable for the people in her community.

“She presented in a way where leaders don’t have to be very stiff, where they don’t have to be super tough, where being a leader can also be fun and explorative,” praised Le. “She taught grace, even when it comes to something so personal, and I guess, even political in a way.”

Vũ and her committee held the unveiling of the mural at a block party with food and music. They invited the local community as well as local politicians. According to Le, turnout for the event was great with community members of all walks of life in attendance. Many members of the Vietnamese community said they felt like their stories were seen, and felt proud of the cultural representation. The mural can still be viewed on Pho Hoa’s structure today.

When asked what best brings the Vietnamese community together, Vũ responded with a laugh and a very decisive answer. “Food.”

Vũ is interested in starting a project surrounding food in the Vietnamese community and what that means in terms of community engagement. “We express love through food. And so really wanting to really kind of create a narrative around that. So people embrace it and I really think that’s how we communicate our love and our emotions to food.”

Aside from her 2017 project with Pho Hoa, Vũ has completed many other artistic endeavors with the goal of centering Vietnamese narratives. She has completed works such as multi-generational family audio interviews as a form of storytelling, such as the Viet Families project, which she considers to be a form of art.

“I did stories in 2018 and 2020, and 2020, where we created performances of spoken word artists of like, because performers sharing their stories and you know, through performances on stage and that’s such a way to connect at least within Vietnamese culture. I know other Asian cultures use performances to connect with the audience, so that was a way for the project to really convey issues around cultural barriers around trauma, around coming out. It was a way to use performances to activate the audience for dialogue and conversations.”

Even while living in the U.S., Vũ continues to foster a relationship with Vietnam, where the rest of her family resides. She most recently visited over the summer to do a pilgrimage to really honor the history of special trauma of the impact of the Vietnam War. She plans to do work to honor Vietnamese history with some work moving forward, with hopes to work on a big kind of installation sculpture for 2025, the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam.

“As an artist in Boston, my home community, I’ve finally started getting commissions and funding,” said Vũ. “Now I’ve really started dreaming up visions for bigger kinds of projects I’m able to really manage from beginning to end and then seeing the possibility of it growing.”