vietnam

TOP TEN 2024

It has been a great honor to write, converse, and think alongside the artmakers of Southeast Asia for the last two years. This TOP TEN list, while shedding light on critical artistic practice and unconventional exhibitions, is nowhere near exhaustive. Wrapping up 2024 and preparing for 2025 with a heart filled with joy and gratitude.

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Saigon: Vy Trịnh

Vy Trịnh, VISION, 2024, Honda Vision moped chassis, flat steel bar, steel rod, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, wheel, rebar, stators, copper wire, brass, flux and rhinestone mesh. Photo: Galerie Quynh. “Positioning this vehicle not only as a quotidian household item but also as a symbol of industrialization,

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Phnom Penh: Trương Công Tùng

“In this ongoing work begun in 2023, Trương interlaced footage shot in his hometown in Vietnam’s Central Highlands to create a mix of oneiric bodies. An elephant’s somber eye, a teardrop trickling down rugose bronze-colored skin, a disheveled figure wandering across scorched red hills, a duo of spectral orbs in a perpetual hide-and-seek: The video seemed to trigger subconscious memories of a forgotten land that exists solely within imaginative boundaries.

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Singapore: Nguyễn Trinh Thi

As viewers recline on beanbags placed strategically on the floor between the two screens, our split peripheral vision becomes enticed by a chimerical montage of found footage—Nguyễn’s previous moving images depicting Jrai people’s sound-centered cosmologies are interspersed with slices of natural landscapes and arpeggiated noises extracted from Vietnamese wartime films along with Hollywood blockbusters.

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Hanoi: Nguyễn Duy Mạnh

The centerpiece of this phantasmagorical feast is the severed head of a qilin—the guardian beast for prosperity in East Asian mythologies—now served half-flayed and white-eyed with disbelief. These ceramic cadavers thus transform into metaphors for his anguish at the commodification and consumption of forlorn craftsmanship and artistic creativity by neoliberal structures of capitalism.

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