Open Studio by Lê Đ.Chunh | “following the stone wall…”

Opening party: 06:30 pm Fri 13 June 2025
On display: 11 am – 07 pm, Tues – Sun, 14 June – 13 July 2025
Manzi Exhibition Space
2 ngõ Hàng Bún, Ba Đình, Hà Nội

From the organizer:

This special summer show at Manzi acts as a prelude to Lê Đ.Chunh’s ongoing multimedia art project, which began in 2017. The project is a long-term research into a resettled migrant community in what was known as a New Economic Zone during the Đổi Mới era (from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s), specifically in Di Linh, Lâm Đồng. The occupants were part of a state-enforced resettlement program, a large-scale postwar operation that relocated people from lowland and urban areas to the highland & mountainous areas, and border regions. This program was an effort of the Vietnamese government to redistribute the population and reconstruct the nation’s economy after decades of strife.

Here, life was forcibly re-established atop the lingering ruins of the colonial period: abandoned plantations were converted into state-run farms; houses were erected on the remains of derelict factories; and running alongside a stone wall—the leftover irrigation structures on small streams were reused to run rudimentary generators. These acts of appropriation, though obvious and necessary for survival, carried with them the quiet irony and absurdity of a coerced negotiation with history: where survival meant adapting to—rather than overcoming—the alien remnants of another era, a reluctant inheritance that shaped life without ever truly belonging to it.

The series of paintings on dzo paper by Lê Đ.Chunh presented in this open studio reflect personal recollections and direct observations, formed by cutting, assembling, and accumulating fragments. Strangely, it is precisely through these scattered and disordered bits that we catch glimpses of a whole generation’s silent struggles, exposing fragments of a collective memory about what was once a “unwilling promised land.” Though it was a destination no one opted for and few could avoid, as if exiled and deprived of memories of a lost home, there is yet hope for a new homeland. A quirk of fate underlines the prospect of a whole new chapter in life.

Stubborn and still — the stone wall never yielded, never crumbled, nor could it be torn down, despite the ravages of war and the churn of time. Once, it was merely a forgotten colonial remnant, too obscure for anyone to name or trace. And yet, from its silence, a roof was raised, a well was dug, and a childhood was tenderly nurtured. Then, “following the stone wall” to Lê Đ.Chunh, is no longer just a gesture of personal remembrance — but perhaps a long journey through overlapping strata of memory, tracing around the ruptures of history — a white space that opens up to countless possibilities and imagined futures.

Lê Đ. Chunh (b. 1990, Lâm Đồng) lives and works in Đắk Nông, Vietnam. He graduated from Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts University in 2015. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, video, and performance, Chung’s multidisciplinary practice engages with both everyday realities and layered historical narratives.

Rooted in the Central Highlands (formerly designated as “New Economic Zones” during the post-war renovation era), where he was born and spent his childhood, Lê Đ.Chunh’s practice has long been shaped by the region’s spiritual culture, oral traditions, micro-histories, and its rapid transformation under exploitation. He explores shifting social and political landscapes through the lens of personal memory. His work unfolds within this terrain of tension—between remembrance and erasure, resilience and rupture—as well as navigates contradictions and the complexities of ongoing reality, along with the enigmatic descent of unresolved motifs and meanings from the past.

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