A Soldiers’ Garden #h

2012 - Photography (Photography)
120 x 80 cm

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves. While some viewers may be drawn to the fresh faces of young soldiers, the images also hint at distances— between the subjects and viewers, intimacy and fear, darkness and light. In this context, the garden becomes a space of transition and in betweenness. Here, the young recruits, mostly under 20-years-old, are “transitioned” into adulthood. They are no longer civilians, but not yet fully-fledged soldiers, and must negotiate this peculiar space of masculinities and male sexualities. Many of them were previously living with parents in the countryside. These portraits commemorate a particular moment in the young recruits’ lives, in which they are initiated into a new space-time of total order: physical, political, economic, and social.

Nhà Sàn Collective (NSC) began operating as an independent artist collective in Hanoi in 2013, when a group of friends set up a publicly accessible space. With or without a physical base, NSC has worked with fellow companions and collaborators to organize exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, talks, and other activities as a support platform for artists in the community. The initiative wants to encourage exchange, expansion, and connection. It is a place that is open toward works in progress and the unexpected; a just-do-it attitude that does not always yield answers. The collective board consists of Truong Que Chi, Nguyen Phuong Linh, Nguyen Quoc Thanh, Vu Duc Toan, and Tuan Mami. The name Nhà Sàn signifies the collective’s foundation which is rooted in the spirit of Nhà Sàn Studio, an artist-run space founded in 1998 in Hanoi. The original Nhà Sàn, a house on stilts, was taken apart in 2020. In the Ngoc Thuy area by the bank of the Red River, the artists imagine this house to become the new Nhà Sàn Collective space, rebuilt, and transformed.