The Afterlives of Live Performance: To Exhibit or Not to Exhibit?
10 AM – 12 PM, Wed 04 Feb 2026
Google Meet (link will be sent to registered participants)
Language: English
Registration link
From the organizer:
A conversation between Teng Yen Hui, Kasamaponn (Waew) Saengsuratham, and Van Do. Moderated by Bill Nguyen
“They say, performance thrives in the moment. In its liveness, its ephemerality. They also say, it’s the smell, the temperature, the humidity, the crowd, the artist’s mood that day, that makes a performance what it is. And then Peggy Phelan, in her important book ‘Unmarked: The Politics of Performance’ (1993), has even gone so far to claim that: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.””
– Vân Đỗ, ‘Post-performance: Again, again, and again’, presentation at Translocal Performance Art Giswil 2025 (Switzerland, 2025) and Photo Hanoi ‘25 (Vietnam, 2025).
However, it is precisely this short lifespan that has made performance art difficult to access and to grasp, and that has, paradoxically, both marginalized it within contemporary art history and fostered myths around its existence.
In recent years, Southeast Asia has witnessed a number of institutional and curatorial efforts to research, archive, and exhibit performance art, alongside long-term, artist-led self-archiving practices by senior artists such as Lee Wen, Tran Luong, and Koh Nguang How. This conversation focuses on curatorial methodologies involved in working with the afterlives of performance, through specific case studies: Teng Yen Hui’s The Living Room (Singapore Art Museum, 2025–2026), which engages with performance remains in SAM’s collection; Kasamaponn (Waew) Saengsuratham’s Live Art and Lifeworlds of Chumpon Apisuk (Bangkok Art and Culture Center, 2025), a multi-layered project presented at BACC that encompassed an archival exhibition, an open-access website, public programs, and experimental formats such as a board game; and Van Do’s ‘Phụ Lục Project’ (2025–ongoing), currently on view and presented at Nguyễn Art Foundation and continuously updated via the project website phulucproject.com.
Confronting the irreproducibility of live performance, ‘The afterlives of live performance’ poses a deliberately unresolved question: to exhibit or not to exhibit performance art once the live moment has passed? Rather than treating documentation and display as compromises, this conversation asks three speakers to discuss their active curatorial decisions – ones that hold space for performance’s ongoing, unstable life without fixing it into myth or monument. The three speakers will share their curatorial and research methodologies, strategies for working with institutions to activate and sustain the longevity of performance works, as well as questions that remain unresolved. The conversation will be moderated by Bill Nguyen, Director of Nguyễn Art Foundation, artist-curator, and co-founder (with Nguyen Phuong
Linh and Gabby Miller) of IN:ACT – one of the longest-running performance art festivals in Vietnam – who will also contribute personal observations from his perspective as a collector, artist, and curator.
Bringing together curators working closely with performance archives, collections, and long-term performance practices in Southeast Asia, the conversation examines how performance persists through remains, collections, reenactments, and institutional frameworks.
Bio of speakers
Kasamaponn Saengsuratham is an ethno-curator whose practice is rooted in ethnographic curatorial methods, focusing on cultural politics and identity within modern and contemporary art in Thailand and Southeast Asia. Her research and exhibitions investigate how culture shapes social values, political discourse, and environmental awareness. She has led major archival initiatives in Thai art, including The Canopy Project and the archives of Somporn Rodboon and Chumpon Apisuk, which serve as open-access resources supporting public research and knowledge sharing in contemporary Thai art.
Her curatorial projects include ‘RIFTS: Thai Contemporary Artistic Practices in Transition, 1980s–2000s’, BACC, Bangkok, Thailand, 2019; ‘Eclipse by Prasong Luemuang’, JWD Art Space, Bangkok, Thailand, 2023; ‘Country Home Sheriff’, JWD Art Space, Bangkok, Thailand, 2024; ‘Red Eagle Sangmorakot: Action Painting’, 182 Art Space, Tainan, Taiwan, 2024; and ‘Chumpon Apisuk’s Lifeworld: An Archival Exhibition’, BACC, Bangkok, Thailand, 2025. In 2025, she received the Grand Prize at the Taoyuan International Art Award (TIAA) for ‘Red Eagle Sangmorakot: No More Hero in His Story’, a collaboration with Chulayarnnon Siriphol and Jean Sit Ajarn Jo. She lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand.
Teng Yen Hui is Curator and Manager, Collections at the Singapore Art Museum. Prior to taking on curatorial work at SAM, she worked independently on writing projects and exhibitions. Teng holds a BSc in Economics from the Singapore Management University and an M.A. in Asian Art Histories conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London (LASALLE). Her research interests include queer visual cultures, performative practices, and more-than-human knowledges in Asia.
Her recent curatorial projects include ‘The Living Room’, SAM, Singapore, 2025-2026; ‘When the World Stops Turning’, starch, Singapore, 2024; Frame Seongsu, Seoul, South Korea, ‘Ocean in Us: Southern Visions of Women Artists’, KMFA, Kiaoshung, Taiwan, 2024-2025; ‘Everyday Practices’, SAM, Singapore, 2024-2025 and ‘SAM Contemporaries: Residues & Remixes’, Singapore, 2023.
Vân Đỗ is a curator and writer based between Vietnam and Thailand. Her practice approaches space as both medium and method, engaging critical spatial practice and spatial dramaturgy to examine politics, performance, and historiography. Working across institutional and independent contexts in Southeast Asia, she is a curator at deCentral (Bangkok / Chiang Mai) and former Artistic Director of Á Space (Hanoi), where she remains on the Curatorial Board.
Selected projects include: ‘Nostalgia for the future’, Hanoi Children’s Palace, 2024, Hanoi, Vietnam; ‘Vy Trinh: Overvoltage’, Gia Lam Train Factory, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2023; ‘WHITE NOISE’, Nguyễn Art Foundation, HCMC, Vietnam, 2023; ‘IN:ACT 2022’, Red River, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2022.
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