Exhibition “The Year is XXXX”
Apr – Nov 2025
10 am – 04 pm, Wed, Sun & Sat
EMASI Nam Long
No. 147, Street no. 8, Nam Long residential area, D7, HCMC
10 am – 04 pm, Tues, Thurs & Sat
EMASI Vạn Phúc
No. 2, Street no. 5, Vạn Phúc residential area, Thủ Đức, HCMC
Opening: 06:30 pm, Thurs 24 Apr 2025 at EMASI Nam Long
From the organizer:
Nguyen Art Foundation is delighted to present The year is XXXX, an exhibition featuring artists Quynh Dong, Nguyen Phuong Linh, Thao Nguyen Phan, and Danh Vo, curated by Thái Hà. The year is XXXX re–examines the travel writings of missionaries and explorers to Indochina and unearths the fictional complexities of their texts. In a new imagining of adventure, the works on display return the gaze to the lands travelled through. The artists’ absorbing installations centre the natural inhabitants of these geographies: the creatures and spirits that play, prey, haunt, and wither as the land is extracted and exploited.
The exhibition follows the adventures of a young girl who wakes and sleeps, and each time waking finds herself in a different stratum of reality. The exhibition essay, written under the guise of an adventure tale, borrows from the folklore traditions of East and Southeast Asia, as well as translations of giang hồ – 江湖 adventures – of outcast protagonists finding kinship among fellow exiles. Though seemingly innocuous, giang hồ fiction was crucial in helping Vietnamese intellectuals spread anti-colonial sentiments and revolutionary proposals for independence. Delving into the tropes of the genre, The year is XXXX explores how adventure is used to invent fantastical fictions of foreign lands, but also as a strategy of escape from colonial subjugation.
Alternating realities, our protagonist wakes up in Nguyen Phuong Linh’s maze of blinding light, the entry to her body of work titled Trùng mù – Endless, sightless. Deconstructing the materials and icons of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, Phuong Linh retraces the travels of bacteriologist and explorer Alexandre Yersin to the region, and delves into its current geopolitics. In colonial Indochina as in the present day, the exploitation of the Highlands is laid bare in exhibition rooms with their own microclimates, fog transitioning to the clinically white, whiteness to the black of rubber or the dead of night. Allusions to the landscape and its inhabitants exist only in literal fragments. Phuong Linh’s minimalist works are engrossed in the atmospheric, at times stifling installation. The fragments refuse to be pieced back together, yet still carry the spectre of their wholeness. In subtle yet significant appearances, the works of Thao Nguyen Phan and Danh Vo ground Phuong Linh’s installation in the perspective of strangers on foreign land. The protagonist and the viewer are lured into Phuong Linh’s entrancing landscape, only to be reminded that they can pass through but never stay.
Another jolt from slumber and our protagonist finds herself instead in Quynh Dong’s twisted utopias, titled Gently Floating Away. Presenting two full-size projections of her three-channel video works, the artist bootlegs the art of painters trained at l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, recomposing them as moving images. In one work, giant, fluorescent lotuses stand static in the rain, plunging the viewer into a time-cancelled dimension. In another, Butoh dancers stand in for fish and sea waves, their uncanny movements and costumes disrupting the water’s fragile calm. The colloquial terminology of “chim, hoa, cá, gái” (birds, flowers, fish, women) refers to icons of Vietnamese art and, by extension, Vietnamese-ness. Endlessly rendered in artworks as in souvenirs, these state-approved emblems of beauty and national identity were originally produced by colonial state-trained painters, appealing to art collectors in the Métropole with a taste for Oriental exotica. If in Phuong Linh’s barren landscape, living beings lurk but never materialize, in Quynh Dong’s works, flora and fauna threaten to overwhelm. Through humorous and irreverent appropriations, the artist reworks these (self-)Orientalizing icons to make the exotic-turned-banal seem “exotic” anew. Yet in the strange logic and physics of her worlds, the exotic far from welcomes consumption. Dangerous lands present a dangerous front that travelers should rightfully heed.
In this adventure through layered realities, the young girl’s story is left open ended. With an exhibition room dedicated to guest curators, the various worlds she finds herself in are newly visualized through rotating displays of six weeks each. As the guest curators continue her adventures, The year is XXXX also navigates exhibition-making and exhibitions themselves as fluid and shifting processes. In a perpetual state of becoming, the exhibition eludes definition and precision. Through the girl’s adventures, the land reclaims its agency to exist and resist on its own terms, beyond the fictions of the traveler’s gaze.
Visits are by appointment only via [email protected] or Nguyễn Art Foundation Facebook page.
Quỳnh Đồng
Quynh Dong is a Swiss-Vietnamese artist, born in 1982 in Hai Phong, Vietnam. She studied at the Bern University of the Arts and later at the Zurich University of the Arts. Dong’s works are multimedia art pieces, encompassing video art, performance, and installations. She plays with cultural stereotypes and blends Eastern and Western elements into “hyperrealities” that are often both poetic and kitschy. Her works integrate pop culture and commerce and juxtapose nature with artificiality. Emotional and symbolic representations characterize her art, which reflects personal and societal themes.
Quynh Dong’s works have been featured in numerous exhibitions and residencies such as Becoming Alice Through the mental tunnel, The Outpost, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2024; Zomia in the Cloud, the 3rd Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai, Thailand, 2023; the 18th Asia NOW – Paris Asia Art Fair, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France, 2022; Beyond Destruction, M.A.P 2019, Heritage Space, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2019; MMCA Residency Changdong, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, 2015. Her publications include A Roadmap of Close Encounters, Southeast Asia Choreographers Network #4 e-book, 2022; Warm Revitalization, Gangwon Triennale, South Korea, 2021.
Nguyễn Phương Linh
Nguyen Phuong Linh (b. 1985, Vietnam) is a conceptual artist with multidisciplinary practice spanning installation, sculpture and video. Her art is sensual, poetic, fragmented, humble and exalted. She travels and collects artefacts, transforming materials to create new forms to offer an alternative interpretation on ambiguous and fragmented histories and memories. Phuong Linh was born and raised at Nha San, the first alternative artist-run space for experimental art in North Vietnam that was co-founded by her father Nguyen Manh Duc. She has been absorbed in an artistic environment by living and working here alongside generations of respected contemporary artists of Vietnam. Phuong Linh has demonstrated a deep understanding and involvement in the local art community both as an artist and art organizer. Her most notable curatorial projects include the international performance art festival IN:ACT and the exhibition series Skylines With Flying People. She has participated in various exhibitions, art projects and residencies around the world, and has received awards and support from the Pollock-Kasner Foundation (US), Hans Nefkens Foundation – BACC Award for Contemporary Art (Thailand), Prince Claus Fund (The Netherlands), Asian Cultural Council (US) and Mondriaan Foundation (The Netherlands). In 2013, she co-founded Nha San Collective.
Phan Thảo Nguyên
Thao Nguyen Phan (b. 1987, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist who graduated with from the Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore in 2009, before receiving her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA in 2013. Drawing from literature, philosophy and daily life, Thao Nguyen observes ambiguous issues in social conventions, history and tradition. She exhibits internationally, with solo and group exhibitions at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2023–2024; Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK, 2022; WIELS, Brussels, Belgium, 2020; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2019; Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France, 2019; Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, 2019; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2018; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2018; Para Site, Hong Kong, 2018; The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, HCMC, Vietnam 2017; and Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2017, among many others.
Thao Nguyen is a 2016–2017 Rolex Protégée, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is a co-founder of the collective Art Labor, with artist Truong Cong Tung and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, which explores cross disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit local communities.
Danh Võ
Danh Vo’s (b. 1975, Vietnam) practice, existing at the intersection of autobiography and collective history, explores the signification found within archival traces as well as the malleable nature of personal identity. With references to migration and integration, Danh Vo’s largely conceptual body of work destabilizes the embedded structures of legitimacy within citizenship and identification. Emerging from personal relationships and fortuitous encounters, his projects take their final form as objects and images that have accrued shifting layers of meaning in the world, whether through their former ownership, their proximity to specific events, or their currency as universal icons.
Danh Vo’s works have been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Paris, France, 2023; Secession, Vienna, Austria, 2021; MUDAM, Luxembourg, 2021; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 2020; Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipei, 2020; South London Gallery, UK, 2019; The Guggenheim, New York; Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen, Denmark; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; CAPC-Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (all in 2018); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA, 2016; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, 2015; Palacio de Cristal, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, 2015; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico, 2014; The Kitchen, New York, USA, 2014; Musée d’art modern de la Ville de Paris, France, 2013; the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy, 2013; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2012; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2012; the Fredericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2011; Artist Space, New York, USA, 2010; and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, 2009.
He won the Arken Art Prize in 2015, the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Foundation in 2013, and the BlauOrange Prize, Berlin, Germany in 2007. He represented Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and was included in the 2019 and 2013 Venice Biennales, the Berlin Biennale in 2014 and 2010, the Singapore Biennale in 2011, and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea in 2010.
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