Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Installation (Installation)

Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

Photography (Photography)

To produce her photo and film works, Diane Severin Nguyen makes amalgam sculptures from found materials, both natural and synthetic. She captures these ephemeral constructions at close range, enlarging minute tensions. Nguyen uses transient, prosthetic lighting—the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, fire—so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements and their lighting change.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Photography (Photography)

In Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970 , a stretcher carrying an injured solider is being carried through swamp-land towards a makeshift operation table.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Siesta begins in a rural landscape of Vietnam. Very quickly, painted images of students sleeping on their school benches appear. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at the center of its economy reads alongside the images.

Photography (Photography)

To produce her photo and film works, Diane Severin Nguyen makes amalgam sculptures from found materials, both natural and synthetic. She captures these ephemeral constructions at close range, enlarging minute tensions. Nguyen uses transient, prosthetic lighting—the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, fire—so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements and their lighting change.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set in the haunting space of an ex-colonial rubber plantation in Central Vietnam, Phuong Linh Nguyen’s film Memory of the Blind Elephant is a tender portrait of the complex economies of interspecies trauma and resilience in the face of continued extraction and destruction. Formerly present in the coronation of Potau Apui (the Jarai King of Fire), in Dr. Yersin’s exploratory crew during the colonial period, and now a major draw for tourists, the figure of the elephant is ailing, grievous, as though haunting its habitat. Intrigued by the reality she observed, Phuong Linh gathered, documented, altered, repositioned the local materials of ceaseless exploitation of natural resources: raw rubber, ferrosols, and aluminium to assert a critical proposition.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development. The single-channel video Waltz of the Machine Equestrians is a response to the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters overtaking the streets of Vietnam as small agrarian communities have been displaced by the construction of skyscrapers. The video shows 28 “equestrians” on motorbikes and scooters arrayed into a rainbow cavalcade held together by strings clipped onto brightly colored ponchos.

Photography (Photography)

In Extra Curriculum Political Science Class 7/1972 , a group of women walk bare-foot and single file towards Dat Mui Mangrove in Ca Mau Province to attend ‘political science class’. These women wear headdress to protect their identities because they are spies placed strategically in the South by the Viet Cong. These classes of the ‘National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam’ took place in the mangrove swamp in makeshift wooden huts where they would learn more of the political points of view of their forces and the changes in military situations across the country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind. In the video, eight protagonists act out their daily lives. The setting is a soon-to-be-demolished public housing facility in Singapore, a country in transition from a mindset of Eastern collectivism to global neoliberalism.