It is appropriate to begin at the origin of it all: Anatomie Artistique by Paul Richer (1849–1933), professor of artistic anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The book, first published in 1889, is recognized as one of the classic works on anatomy for the plastic arts and was used as a reference by many famous artists, including Renoir, Degas, and Braque. Linh discovered the book by chance while studying in France, and for the next three years, it followed him on a rigorous but productive route of self-teaching, in which “copying bones” was one of the foundational steps. He started by replicating the book page by page, painstakingly tracing each bone structure with a ballpoint pen (which cannot be erased or fixed), forcing the painter to examine closely and calculate proportions precisely before drawing a line. Recording the entire book by hand created a mental "map" that helped him remember the technical terms, muscle attachment points, and fixed landmarks of the skeleton; at the same time, his hand gradually developed muscle memory for drawing a single continuous line.

However, a book's 2D flat surface has limitations: it might mislead the student by confining only one point of view in the absence of a three-dimensional reference. Once again, fortune turned mysteriously in Linh's favor: as an art student, he began to be admitted to the Strasbourg Institute of Anatomy. There he worked as meticulously as any medical student, testing what he had learned in the book against real bones and specimens, looking from different angles, and rotating the joints to understand the protrusions, hollows, and deep grooves where the muscle bundles attach. Based on theory collected from the book and the hands-on experience gained on learning with cadavers, Linh systematized his understanding of anatomy by geometrizing bones into basic volumetric structures (cubes, cylinders, and flat planes), stripping away unnecessary details to highlight the core structure while maintaining anatomical accuracy. Linh's personal archive, which includes three volumes on exhibit at "23" (anatomical examinations of the skull, foot, and lower leg), is only a small portion of his extensive self-directed research.

Based on such a logical and detailed formula, Linh developed a style of his own, disciplined and meticulous: a single, unbroken line, with no erasure or correction. Rather than building depth through perspective or layered space, he concentrates on the accuracy of every detail and every part of his figures’ bodies, in varying poses and angles. Most of the works are monochrome, with color reduced to a minimum, and nothing in them is abstract: every element has a clear, definite form. Each drawing is an act of distillation: rather than copying from direct observation, he draws on his subconscious and imagination to compose an object on a two-dimensional surface. That object cannot be placed just anywhere. It must hold a fixed position and a coherent relationship to the whole, in proportion, angle, length, and pose. Get one parameter wrong, and the whole drawing loses its reasons and purposes.

Ironically, although he has no intention of imposing a specific story or constructing another universe, Linh unconsciously allows us to glimpse the underlying bubbles of narrative and personal obsession; suppressed as they are, they nonetheless smolder beneath, preparing to explode and pop up on the surface. The twenty-three drawings are rich in poses and various in perspectives, yet the backgrounds are almost totally blank. Every subject, whether a realistically rendered body or a fictional hybrid creature, seems confined to no clear backdrop or context but is instead enveloped in its own mystery. They appear fragmentary and detached from one another, yet they all have the same air of indeterminacy, and they are clearly no longer the psychophysiological unit of any specific individual. Rather, the human figure, Linh's constant subject, slowly sheds its individuality and becomes a single anonymous BODY, stripped bare and unnamed. It is carried on a current that runs between ecstasy and agony and that washes away the particulars of each life as it moves toward the one ending all share: death.

The body is the physical condition of every living being: we live in it, declare to own it, yet depend on it completely. It is the first thing we are given to enter the world and also the last thing for us to let go. It is a finely balanced work of nature, yet however thoroughly we study this machine, a time will come when we are helpless before it; the body remains a limit we must always yield to and can never escape. Knowing this leaves us caught between two feelings: pride in a structure so exquisite and so aware of its own power, and sorrow at the fragility of mortal flesh.

The BODY, in the end, is a paradox, being bound and boundless at once. Linh’s drawings carry, almost without his meaning them to, a quiet revolt against its finitude, against the old sentence of aging, illness, and death. That the revolt must fail does not diminish the body’s worth. If anything, it makes the brief festival the body is entitled to, and which life allows it occasionally, all the more worth celebrating.

Life, and every living being that has ever existed or vanished, is the product of evolution: the sum of countless marvelous coincidences. Every human being begins from 23 pairs of chromosomes; the Earth’s axis tilts by roughly 23.5 degrees, just enough to bring about the succession of seasons, the foundation of life; blood takes an average of about 23 seconds to complete one circuit of the human body... The number 23 recurs with uncanny persistence in biology, mathematics, history, religion, mythology, and beyond, to the point of becoming a phenomenon of popular culture with a name of its own: the “23 Enigma.” Is there a great truth behind it all, or is it merely the result of our habit of seeking patterns among random data, together with confirmation bias in the human mind? Either way, Linh bears the imprint of coincidences of his own. From the old bookshop to the door of the Institute of Anatomy, random threads, knotted together, led him to this path. Fate, or just a story we tell afterward? It is hard to say. What is certain is that, like a pen line once set down on paper, it cannot be erased; that chain of chance events, after much uncertainty of his adolescent years, drew itself into a clear path, and Linh is walking it still and will keep walking it, as he draws: patiently, in one continuous, decisive line.

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