An exhibition featuring Vietnamese women who are going to marry South Korean and Taiwanese men is taking place in Singapore.

Titled “Quiet Dream & Steep Price,” the collection includes 2 series “Steep Price” capturing Muslim weavers in Varansi, India and “Quiet Dream” depicting Vietnamese women, who are getting married to Korean and Taiwanese men. These women hail from Tan Loc Commune in the southern city of Can Tho.

Oh Soon Hwa, the taker of the photos who is a photography instructor from Singapore’s Nanyang University - the exhibition’s organizer - shared with Tuoi Tre Newspaper that she got idea for the project once seeing banners of Vietnamese wives in her hometown in 2006.

Married to a Frenchman whose grandmother is a Vietnamese, the artist admitted she sometimes couldn’t understand her husband’s family and wondered how Vietnamese women who couldn’t even speak Korean adapted to life in the foreign country.

In 2008, she came to Vietnam to start the photo project.

“I left South Korea in 1994, and the time living overseas brought me a different perspective on life,” Oh said. “A decade later, I got back to my hometown and saw its changes. I see Vietnamese brides coming to my country’s countryside. I started the project to understand the women and to capture the dreams they told me.”

Oh shared that what she wanted to deliver through the photos was not the women’s poverty, but the beautiful place and society they left behind.

“Each of those women comes from beautiful towns where people share the love together. I want to show the image of a world they lived before moving to Korea. What they left behind is what they knew, what awaits them is what they do not know, from the weather, landscapes, culture and people.”

The artist also expressed her hope to change people’s awareness in sex equality.

According to her, the reason why many women flock to marry foreign men is they can’t earn a living with their current jobs. Oh also expressed her concern on kids born to those marriages. “When they grow up, will they be treated equally?”

After Singapore, the exhibition will move to South Korea next month.

Oh Soon Hwa has participated in more than 50 exhibitions internationally, including the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Lucca Photo Fest in Italy, Pingyao International Photo Festival in China, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham.