{"id":6537,"date":"2025-07-28T09:25:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T09:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/art.qweb.com.vn\/en\/?p=6537"},"modified":"2025-12-03T03:40:38","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T03:40:38","slug":"threads-of-continuity-vietnam-in-the-11th-asia-pacific-triennial-of-contemporary-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artnation.vn\/en\/threads-of-continuity-vietnam-in-the-11th-asia-pacific-triennial-of-contemporary-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Threads of continuity: Vietnam in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between 1993 and 2024, curatorial approaches evolved considerably, and the first<\/span> three editions of the Triennial are often regarded as having forged the deepest bonds and relationships between the two nations. Interestingly, APT1, APT2 and APT3 highlighted the influence of folk and rural traditions, street culture and vernacular art forms on Vietnamese contemporary art. Although the APT doesn\u2019t have an overarching theme to influence the selection of works, it is possible to see how some of these threads resonate with the group of five artists featured in APT11 from Vietnam and its diaspora: Le Thuy, Bui Cong Khanh, Le Giang, Truong Cong Tung and Mai Nguyen-Long. In their works, nuanced explorations of tradition and innovation, memory and materiality, continuity and return, are visible, tracing complex genealogies across personal and cultural histories.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Le Thuy and her family with \u201cEcho\u201d (2023) during the opening week of APT11, QAGOMA 2024. Photo: Nicholas Umek, QAGOMA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In-person curatorial travel and research is a crucial element of the APT, and artist selection occurs in advance to allow new works to be developed and loans to be facilitated. In November 2022, I began my APT11 research travel to Vietnam, visiting Truong Cong Tung in his studio on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Tung combines his training in lacquer painting with a keen interest in science, ecology and cosmology, melding elements resonant of nature and culture. His practice is influenced by his upbringing in Dak Lak province and his ongoing relationship with the indigenous Jrai people from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, whose customary beliefs are grounded in place. Tung works with a range of media, including installation, sound and found objects, to reflect on, in his words, \u201cthe cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernisation, as embodied in the morphing ecology, beliefs or mythology of a land.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

His site-specific \u201cA disoriented garden\u201d (2024), created for APT11, includes a garden of gourds \u2013 one of the oldest cultivated crops of Southeast Asia, traditionally used to carry water or to form the body of musical instruments. Suspended lacquer spheres reference archival photographs of landscapes impacted by human and natural disasters, from forest fires to war. Across from the garden beds, a series of wooden grids, once inhabited by silkworms, are inset with stones gathered all over Vietnam, resembling constellational maps.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tung travelled to Brisbane in 2024 with his assistant and brother, Tu, to install his work onsite. Together, they arranged lacquered gourds across beds of sand, connecting them to an arterial network of plastic tubing that fed into a pond of ink-darkened water. Various gourds held distinct materials: turmeric for its scent and vibrant hue; tiny green mung beans, which quickly sprouted; rice, meticulously swept into place with a wide brush; red kidney beans, added for their weight; and dishwashing liquid, replenished daily to generate frothing mounds of kinetic bubbles. Motion sensors triggered speakers that emitted the ambient hum of insects \u2013 bees, cicadas and others \u2013 adding an aural layer to the installation\u2019s sensory landscape.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Truong Cong Tung installing \u201cA disoriented garden\u201d at APT11, QAGOMA 2024. Photo: Chlo\u00eb Callistemon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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For Truong Cong Tung, creation is a cyclical and collaborative process in which time, temperature, erosion and spirituality play equal parts. Each element in his \u201cA disorientated garden\u201d implies a process of transformation, suggesting an organism whose constituent parts become meaningful and alive through their interaction and the viewer\u2019s presence. Through poetic juxtapositions, the work acknowledges the broader impact of modernisation and industrialisation on Vietnam, the legacies of chemical warfare and ecological disaster, as well as those who have been dislocated from their homes and places of worship. Nevertheless, the work does not act as a memorial but instead suggests hybridity and growth \u2013 a communal existence in which objects take on new significance when subjected to subtle processes of natural and cultural transformations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hanoi, I visited Le Giang at her studio where she shared with me several bodies of work. Across her broader practice, Giang has captured the architecture of communal houses, interrogated their colonial histories, and \u2013 like Tung \u2013 explored shifting cultural perceptions of the natural world. With a strong interest in Vietnamese artisanal traditions and customary beliefs, she works across a diverse range of media, including vernacular techniques such as plaster casting, inlay, paper embossing and more recently, \u201cpainting\u201d with gemstones.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2020, Giang conducted research in the provinces of Yen Bai and Nghe An in northern Vietnam, both now significant centres of the gemstone trade. There, she observed the process by which artisans create intricate paintings using the discarded, \u201cimpure\u201d fragments of gemstones \u2013 sorted by size and colour, ground into fine powder and carefully applied over a perspex sheet following a drawing beneath. The pigments are fixed with glue, then scrubbed until they glisten. Giang was particularly struck by the popularity of a genre known as \u201cMajestic mountains and expansive rivers\u201d. While often considered \u201ckitsch\u201d, the paintings hold wide appeal and are believed to symbolise the purity of the natural world, as well as conferring prosperity, longevity, and other blessings to their owners.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Le Giang, \u201cMajestic Mountains and Expansive Rivers 14\u201d (2021), gemstone on acrylic, 55 x 82 cm, at APT11, QAGOMA 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Le Giang, \u201cMajestic Mountains and Expansive Rivers 9\u201d (2021), gemstone on acrylic, 46 x 70 cm, at the APT11, QAGOMA 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Le Giang\u2019s series of gem paintings, titled after this genre, points to the irony in such cultural perceptions of the natural world. Gem mining has led to erosion, the pollution of lakes and the deforestation of areas considered sacred in local spiritual practices.\u00a0 Some of her gem paintings appear abstract, replicating the surface of the cut gemstones to imply the process of their extraction in the gouging of the Earth. Departing from the distant, awe-inspiring view of a sublime nature, these works use an intimate lens to reveal flaws and fissures. Contrasting with these is a series of representational landscapes that depicts areas ravaged by open extraction mining and pollution. Initially enchanting, with their shimmering surfaces and seductive colours, on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the trees are sickly, barren of leaves; weeds flourish while erosion is widespread. The landscape is suffering. Through this tension, Giang exposes the dissonance between the pristine images of towering mountains and flowing rivers and the darker environmental, social and economic realities that they obscure.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Installation view of Le Giang\u2019s \u201cMajestic mountains and expansive rivers\u201d (2021), gemstone on acrylic, at the AP11, QAGOMA 2024. Photo: Joe Ruckli | QAGOMA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2020, Le Thuy and her family left behind their busy life in Ho Chi Minh City and relocated to Hoi An. Her ambitious installation \u201cEcho\u201d (2023) was completed following this move and evokes a ruined house, drawing from the architectural and cultural history of this ancient trading port which has been shaped by centuries of interactions between Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and French influences. Mindful of the threats to Hoi An\u2019s heritage posed by rapid urban development, Le Thuy salvaged nine doors from a dismantled traditional house. Over the course of a year, she transformed them in her studio, applying lacquer and gold leaf to create layered works referencing botanical forms, historical memory, \u201cmemento mori\u201d, and pan-Asian religious iconography. The skeleton of a house, comprising roof and supporting posts, was built at QAGOMA to the artist\u2019s specifications, creating a frame for the various components of \u201cEcho\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n