An Hoai Visual Art × Judith Esmée

This was a collaboration about questions, not answers. An Hoài Visual Art — the work of Vietnamese visual artist An Hoài — came in with a single starting point: the connection between women and the sea. Wild, slightly dark, and meant to leave a viewer with more questions than it answers.

What we made

A series of slow, sculptural images shot at a coastal location, exploring what happens when you place a woman in dialogue with the elements rather than against them. The costume was hand-made by An Hoài. The props — woven crown, branch arrangements, raw textures — she brought too. She wanted the visuals to belong to a specific world, not to a generic editorial language, and you can feel that in every frame.

The full series is published across three posts on her Instagram (linked below) and walks through different emotional registers — from contemplative to almost feral — within one continuous visual story.

About An Hoài Visual Art

An Hoài is a Vietnamese visual artist working at the intersection of photography, costume design, and storytelling. Her practice has a journaling quality to it — each shoot reads as a chapter, not a standalone image. She shares her process under @anhoai.journaling, which is also where the finished collab series lives.

What I brought to the shoot

A movement-trained body, a willingness to stay in slow, uncomfortable shapes for as long as the light needed, and the comfort with weird positions that aerial training quietly drills into you. An Hoài directed the frame; I held the shapes and let her vision do the talking.

There’s something about this kind of artist-led shoot that’s harder to describe than the commercial stuff. You’re not modelling for a product or a brand. You’re inside someone else’s vision and your job is to inhabit it as honestly as you can. That’s a different headspace than commercial work, and one of the reasons I love working with independent visual artists like An Hoài.