My name is Mai Hua, I am a 39 yo French woman with Vietnamese origins. Divorced with 2 kids. I am an artist based in Paris.

This blog is my exploration of beauty, within myself (DIARY) and within others (PORTRAITS). I keep writing (texts about) myself on various issues such as femininity, motherhood, the intimate, joy…; and filming people all around me. Doing what they do, what they like. We laugh and cry together, we don’t try to, we just do. I try to understand something about themselves, this part of their truth they sometimes don’t even know. I film people who, without noticing it, show me their beauty. And I find them so, so beautiful.

And my wish is to reveal and share this energy and grace with them and with you.

After having filmed so many people, I always think of Gertrude Stein’s poem: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.  And my belief is that beauty… is.

That’s it.

So if beauty is, beauty is in me, and beauty is in you.

Life can be awful, brutal, violent or even just not as we wish it should be, but beauty is always here. In me, in you. Shining like the sun behind the clouds.

Just see it. Just feel it.

Many people say beauty needs us to elevate, but maybe we should just do the opposite, ‘down-evate,’ to see it in any occasion, around us.  What you see is always a mirror of your soul, so if beauty is in you, you can see it anywhere. That is how we could “create” beauty. Just by seeing it.

My father always told me not to confuse the moon and the finger that points at it (he had it from the Buddha actually). So there is no way beauty could be described, defined (despite the classical era that waited for beauty to provoke a “pleasant” feeling), even performed. Beauty is, effortless and miraculous like a rose blooming, realizing its own essence.

As soon as you have to measure it, fit it to something that is not “you” (which is, I know, a lifetime journey) then it is aesthetics, not beauty.

Beauty is rooted to a life principal, and that is why the emotions we share here (i feel so grateful to receive all your incredible comments), are so so strong.

Since I discovered that Beauty is, I’ve understood that the search of beauty is vain. I do not have to treasure it, grab it, get attached to it, because beauty is. And it will always be. Still, I try to connect myself to it as much as I can. This energy and state of mind enables me to be in the present, to look around me, anywhere, anytime, to “meet” beauty again and again. It nourishes my heart and soul. And my wish would be for you folks who read me to see how beautiful you are.

Investing in and living my own beauty helps me relate to others. This is a place from which it becomes possible to « make love ». I’m joy, I’m freedom, I’m compassion. I am not only me, I am a flower, I am the other, I am the universe.