Hop Dac’s own personal childhood as a Vietnamese refugee in Western Australia is inspiring his newest collection of work.
Some 20,000 people are recognised as refugees in Australia each year, and the Bread and Butter Project is doing its part to help refugees acquire new skills, build confidence and find work.
Based in Marrickville in Sydney’s inner west, the Bread and Butter Project is Australia’s first social enterprise bakery and holds a 100 per cent employment rate for refugee bakers who have apprenticed with them.
General Manager Philip Hoban says the ‘chronic shortage of bakers in Australia’ created an easy market for the project, with over 20,000 baker job vacancies predicted to remain unfilled by 2020.
Mr Hoban says the program helps refugees ‘build confidence’, learning both the ‘art of artisan baking’ as well as receiving tutoring in English.
‘Passion has been the most important thing I’ve learned from the Bread and Butter Project,’ baker graduate Steven Qaqas has told Sky News
Mr Qaqas says the bakery offers a ‘good opportunity to increase your skills and learn English’ and hopes to one day open his own bakery business to help support his family.
Image: News Corp Australia
Hop Dac took a 10-year hiatus from painting, but picked up a paintbrush again in 2021.
The Geelong artist returned to the creative field during Covid to help his mental health. He didn’t expect it to become his full time job, but is so glad it did.
Hop’s journey to making art his career is also influencing his art with a lot of Asian/Australian life influence.
Hop Dac injects Asian/Australian life into his art. Photo: Ginger + Mint
Born in Vietnam, Hop came to Australia as a refugee in 1980 when he was three years old. He remembers certain things, including being separated from his dad when the women and children were put onto a bigger boat.
“We landed in Indonesia separate from dad, I remember going down to the wharf and walking the jetty looking for him. We were reunited after five days,” Hop says.
The family settled in Geraldton in Western Australia and Hop ended up studying Fine Art at Curtin University in Perth. He moved to Melbourne in 2002 as he was looking for somewhere that had more art culture.
“I was dabbling in art, there was no method to it, I would just paint what came to mind,” he recalls, adding he knew art could be a career but didn’t know how. “I didn’t know how to ask for help or for support.”
Hop grew up in a very strict Catholic household and his parents – who met when his military officer father was looking for a seamstress to alter US army uniforms to fit the Vietnamese and came across a sign in her window – were in constant survival mode. He recognises now his parents didn’t know how to give that emotional support at the time.
Hop feels privileged to be able to be an artist. Photo: Ginger + Mint
His studio is in a creative hub off Rutland St, Newtown. Photo: Ginger + Mint
Art took a back seat for Hop and instead he studied professional writing and editing at RMIT.
It wasn’t until Covid hit and his mental health was struggling that Hop returned to art.
“I find art is a release and a good way to straighten myself out,” he reveals.
“My brain didn’t stop developing and when I came back to art I found that I was able to make work much more readily than I used to.”
It was at the end of 2021 when Hop had taken up painting again and people were starting to be interested in his work, that his day job contract in comms and marketing came to an end.
“I was interviewing for other jobs but I realised I didn’t want them, I had enough to live on for a few months so thought I’d give it a go,” he says.
Art is now Hop’s full time job and he has his first solo exhibition, Swarm, coming up at Boom Gallery.
“This is as far as I’ve gone career-wise. If it wasn’t for the pandemic and going mental I’d probably still be working in the public service,” he says.
Ideas for the exhibition came from a trip back to Western Australia this year. Hop spent lots of time with family and seeing the fibro houses reminded him of the ones he grew up in. Plus it was Lunar New Year, so he was around a lot of Vietnamese people.
He saw this cabinet on Facebook Marketplace and wanted to paint it. Photo: Ginger + Mint
“At the moment I’m trying to depict Asian/Australian life,” he says.
One of the pieces he is working on features a cabinet he saw on Facebook marketplace with moths going across the glass, which he says are a symbol of migration.
Another piece features mid-century furniture with goannas running around inside.
“I’m not sure what this painting is about but it feels right. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re doing but sometimes you just paint until it feels right and this is one of those,” he says.
Hop works on two to three paintings at a time, with creativity going on subconsciously for all of them.
He says the Asian/Australian representation is him trying to figure out his place in the world and being open to thinking along those lines.
“Growing up in a country town you experience racism. I didn’t allow myself the freedom to wonder about those things until I was much more comfortable with myself,” he says.
Hop has an exhibition at Boom Gallery in June. Photo: Ginger + Mint
And while he thought returning to Vietnam when he was 21 would give him a better understanding of himself, it wasn’t like that. It confirmed to him that he was someone who didn’t necessarily have a home, but now he considers Western Australia that place for him.
Hop is looking forward to passing on his learnings to his two daughters and is extremely proud of how far he has come.
“It is mind boggling to me that I’m able to do what I want in a much more holistic way than I knew about when I was younger,” he says.
“You know about art as a career but being able to do it is a privilege.”
Follow @hop.dac.art on Instagram and his solo show Swarm will be exhibiting at Boom Gallery from June 22.