MOLI VIEW™

Whether she's carving intricate human forms into candy-colored crayons or painting illustrations of people on ceramic plates, Vietnam-born artist Diem Chau's beautiful creations spark the imagination and inspire the kind of tactile desire you felt as a kid in the toy store. Pretty ironic stuff when you consider the fact that Chau didn't have a very typical childhood.

"I was very quiet and stayed to myself," she told me. "I grew up around adults more than children and I didn't have a lot of friends. It all sounds so horrid, but I had a blast. I had the jungle! I would sum up my childhood experience as a year's residency in the Philippines Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) where my family stayed before arriving in America. The PRPC was a place to acclimatize refugees to Western procedures and teach us a bit of English. They also screened us for contagious diseases and to see if we were commie spies (or so I've been told). We lived in communal housing, were given weekly food rations, and both my parents did odd jobs during the day for extra money."

» Check out the article