Lucie Doan

I was born on the brink of death a 3-months premature little creature in the old capital of Germany to a complex, sensitive, and philosophically rebellious pair of parents who hailed from opposite ends of the world. As an amorphous amalgamation of various cultures and novel life experiences, I grew up with a great many conflicting, confusing, and oft uncomfortably introspective thoughts and feelings about myself, the world, and my place in it. The dreamer archetype as famously alluded to in John Lenon's Imagine is one that I often related to as a dreamy and intellectually-inclined child.

These inclinations have inspired in me a kind of search for the answers to the existential crises that I felt on both a personal and global level: about social injustices, the feelings, intellect and sufferings of animals, the destruction and potential for healing of our earth, the true ontological nature of the universe and of meaning, the fascinatingly complex vagaries of human relations, and everything to do with our grander search for truth as a very confused, marvellously vulnerable, and conflicted human species.

My search led me down a journey consisting of a great variety of intellectual and artistic endeavours. In school, I expressed these feelings of subtle wrongness in the world through the medium of digital art, creating politically and conceptually charged illustrations. More recently, however, I am delving more deeply into creating visual art that is rather concerned with the purity and humility of beauty and truth, as well as reading and writing poetry and essays concerning spirituality (Eastern or otherwise), philosophy, and the evolution of humankind. My endeavours and interests largely span fine arts painting, poetry & prose, literature, philosophy, metaphysics, Eastern mysticism, psychology, piano, world travel, space, A.I., social justice & human rights, animal rights, and psychedelic spirituality.

Once a stateless alien with no citizenship or human rights in this maddeningly divided and inequitable world, I have since fought tooth and nail against the puppetry of bureaucracy for my relatively newfound right to freedom, giving me an exhilarating appreciation for my privilege to now be able to travel so extensively across the world. These adventures have greatly furthered my quest for truth, connection, and the novel experiences that make being human so ineffably beautiful and rewarding. Yet it does not make sense that others are not so lucky. It does not make sense that my current British citizenship, recently gained purely on the grounds of the arbitrary belonging of my estranged father to an exclusionary, abusive, and imperialist country, as declared on abstract pieces of bureaucratic paper, would now give me innumerably more rights to see the world and assume higher privileges of international respect than those born on apparently less respectable grounds of this one and only earth. The shocking juxtaposition between my former stateless condition and my current freedom, divided by a thin line of archaically sexist and arbitrarily discriminatory nationality laws, opened my eyes and heart since a young, preteen age to the ludicrous injustice of the world. As a child of both a colonialist and a colonised culture, still reeling from the unspeakable pains of its past and ever residual wounds, I have since been at once fascinated and endlessly frustrated by the absurd divisions of the world that have led to so much anguish, ignorance, and hatred.

This personal struggle, along with my education on matters of gender inequality, wealth inequality, political ignorance, and most of all, those of the suffering and exploitation of the animals we enslave, form the crux of my interest in the kind of activism that enacts the urgently needed, most compassionate and connective possible change that we must go through to save ourselves, the animals, and the planet. I now write largely about philosophy, human connection, and animal rights, as well as philosophical film analyses and the like. This website provides a small and ever incomplete selection of the artistic endeavours I've dabbled in both personally and commercially, and thereby chronicle my truth in its most hygienic and condensed version as appropriate for the eyes of the world.

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I grew up with the privilege of attending the respected international institutions Lycée Français International Marguerite Duras, Saigon South International School (when I was featured in “Amazing Women in HCMC” at Saigonparents.com), and the University of Brighton, England. I am now based in the coniferous mountains of Dalat, Vietnam, working remotely as a photographer, marketing graphic/web designer & writer at Authentique Home. My personal and professional skills comprise of painting & illustration, art direction, print/web/graphic design, art & commercial photography, creative writing, copywriting, animation, film editing, and casual modelling. I speak native English, near-fluent Vietnamese, advanced French, and very rough, beginner German.

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"L'art est un mensonge qui nous permet de dévoiler la vérité."
― Pablo Picasso, 1923