Part 1. The Process and Collection

Part 2. My workshop

My Art Gallery

It starts with a lump of rice dough.
Add a little color, a pair of hands, and a lot of imagination, and somehow, one will get a “tò he”. So what exactly is it?
Tò he is a traditional Vietnamese folk toy, traditionally made from glutinous rice dough and shaped by hand into tiny animals, people, flowers, and scenes from everyday life.

While learning to make tò he, I found myself thinking about a poem I first encountered in literature class back in 8th grade. At first, the connection felt absurd: one was a folk toy, the other a dessert. Yet both began with rice dough, were shaped by human hands, and somehow carried stories about Vietnamese women.
That poem is “Bánh trôi nước” by Hồ Xuân Hương, which translates directly to “Floating Rice Cake.”
In “Bánh trôi nước”, Hồ Xuân Hương turns an ordinary rice cake into a metaphor for womanhood—carried through life’s rises and falls, shaped by forces beyond its control, yet holding onto its inner strength.

I see something of myself in that story, especially as a young Vietnamese woman. But I don’t want that to be the whole story. Instead, I want my tò he to be messy, curious, and experimental, allowing me to get things wrong, change shape, and become something that feels like my own.

Apparently, one tò he was never going to be enough.
So I decided to make a whole collection of tiny rice-dough characters, each with its own little personality.