Truong is always drawn to title a piece within a body of work the title of that body. This piece embodies her reimagining of hòn non bộ. Sky, water, land and tree—the elements of nature—are painted intertwined and in flux, at times merging and dissolving together. The visual strategies of disorientation and fracturing of forms render the characters as apparitions, which continues throughout all paintings in the exhibition. Drawing from the philosophy of hòn non bộ, holes and caverns become her portals into a spiritual world, past or present.

Human, animal, plant and element emerge as apparitions from a past place lost in generational shift. Trauma is sometimes loud, but not spoken aloud. Instead, one is gifted unspoken support. If we are mindful, we bear witness to mundane acts revealed as interior processes of healing.

Both her parents loved to garden. From the tiny garden of fruit trees her father planted in their California duplex—where he spliced four plum varieties onto one tree so that it bore the fruit of five—to the modest garden of roses, geraniums and sweet figurines her mother cared for daily until she could not. The act of their hands and care.

On silk over the sky portals, water and hands symbolize migration, displacement and the value of having one another. Additional linen is cut and painted as collaged leaf shapes. Within these leaves are intertwined hands and a snake, her father's zodiac animal. In the very top middle, behind an abstracted swirl of water, is a faint tiger mirroring the fractured gesture of a tiger facing upwards, its leg becoming a tree. The tiger represents both her mother's and her son's zodiac signs. At the center of the painting are fractal bits of her landscapes, waterfalls, and flowers depicting her mother's birthplace of Dalat, painted on Vietnamese do paper gifted to her years ago by a Vietnamese artist. The durable paper comes from the Vietnamese do tree and has a longstanding tradition with an intense process of making.

This painting itself takes the form of an abstracted tree rather than a stone formation, in homage to her parents' love of growing things that nourish our bodies and souls, and to the tree itself. We are learning just how extraordinary trees are—communicating with one another through underground networks and far-reaching sensory ways, even using scent to warn nearby trees of danger.