Pipo Nguyen-duy writes:
“‘East of Eden’ began in the United States as a series of large, staged, color, narrative photographs that question the historical depiction of the American landscape as the Garden of Eden. The historical strategy of utilizing the landscape as a metaphor for nationalism and optimism provides the background for my visual thesis. Initially I was interested in looking at our contemporary American landscape as the Garden of Eden and re-framing it from the post-September 11th perspective. These photographs in ‘East of Eden’ dealt with humanity in the context of the post-apocalyptic landscape. Since In 2005, I began to travel throughout Vietnam to continue working on my visual thesis both in a landscape that bears the physical scars of the war, and with the people that have lived and survived its horrors.”