Envisioning hidden landscapes: outlining the image by the shadows of the mountain, tracing the map by the shadows of the trees

10 AM – 12 PM, Sat 11 July 2026
EMASI Nam Long
No. 147, Street no. 8, Nam Long Residential Area, Tan Thuan Ward, HCMC
Registration link

From the organizer:

Nguyễn Art Foundation (NAF) cordially invites you to the talk and discussion ‘Envisioning hidden landscapes: outlining the image by the shadows of the mountain, tracing the map by the shadows of the trees’, marking the launch of the program ‘Within & Beyond: A Taxonomy in Exhibition-making’ – a yearlong educational and curatorial initiative spearheaded by Vicky Do and featuring Le Anh Thu, Nguyen Vo Bao Han, and Nhi Phan.

Curating requires ongoing interdisciplinary inquiry, discussion, and comprehension. Therein, the process of placing oneself in unfamiliar situations – aiming to explore the unknown, familiarize oneself with it, and subsequently interpret it through a personal lens to generate a broader layer of meaning – is a journey that is both daunting and deeply compelling.

Every journey begins with a trip – whether a physical excursion, a state of “being-in-space,” or a conceptual foray into an artist’s universe through their work. From there, existing thoughts and ideas expand through observation, (re)positioning, comparison, and even serendipitous discoveries.

How can a land be visualized and perceived when both the administrative boundaries and the entities that shaped it have been completely erased or are in constant flux?

Landscape is not a fixed entity defined by administrative boundaries or static historical markers, but rather a continuous process shaped by bodily experience and shifting frontiers. Taking An Giang as a point of departure, the discussion raises questions about how we “see” and define a territory, thereby proposing alternative ways of viewing the landscape: envisioning spaces that allow for disappearance, and latent conflicts to engage in an ongoing dialogue to define one another.

The talk opens with an in-depth conversation with writer Vu Thanh Son regarding his work ‘Sóng đồng bằng’ (Waves of the Delta), exploring how literature employs place names to anchor memory and reconstruct the spiritual map of a historical era. Engaging the ideas sparked by the work, Le Anh Thu, Nguyen Vo Bao Han, and Nhi Phan draw upon their fieldwork experiences to address three major questions: How does the body orient itself when disoriented in a remote borderland? How can we re-map ecological entities that have completely vanished from reality? And how can we trace the historical scars hidden beneath a landscape’s surface tranquillity?

About speakers

Vũ Thành Sơn

Vu Thanh Son is a writer based in Saigon. In recent years, he has focused on researching iconic figures of the South, such as Phan Thanh Gian, Petrus Ky, and Huynh Phu So. ‘Sóng đồng bằng’ (Waves of the Delta) is his most recently published novel; set in Cochinchina during the dawn of modern Vietnam, the work portrays the region’s cultural landscape, the atmosphere of its riverine environment, and the destinies of individuals caught in the turbulent currents of the era.

Lê Anh Thư

Born and raised in Hoi An, Anh Thu holds a BA in Literature from Fulbright University Vietnam. Part ghost, part misc collector, her interests center around mourning and storyweaving in urban areas, with special focus on artistic practices in Asia. She now joins AirHue as a coordinator to support artists throughout their residencies.

Nguyễn Võ Bảo Hân

Bao-Han Nguyen-Vo is a cultural worker and visual artist from Nha Trang (Vietnam). She holds a BA in Arts and Media Studies with honors from Fulbright University Vietnam; and an MA in Art and Social Action from NCAD Dublin. Han’s practice combines visual ethnography and archival research, using documentary photography, experimental film, and community-centered curation to reimagine fragmented histories through vernacular narratives. She co-produced ‘Lèm dì dị Open Studios’ (2023-2024), ‘As Time Gone By’ (2024), and ‘Uncertain Ethnographers’ (Dublin, 2026). Her photobook, ‘As Water Erodes’ (2024), wove personal archives to interrogate historical amnesia along the coastal hinterlands of central Vietnam. Han’s collaborative work includes Hagait Ni (2023-2024), a preservation project on Cham music heritage. During her stay in Ireland from 2024 to 2026, Han developed her socially engaged artistic practice, adopting an auto-anthropological perspective through working with the community of Vietnamese female immigrant workers at nail salons in Dublin.

Nhi Phan

Nhi Phan is an independent curator currently living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Through her curatorial work and research, Nhi explores themes of memory, micro-histories, as well as the entanglements and influences of (digital) technologies within social interactions. She is particularly interested in residual narratives and the invisible motives hidden behind those contexts, those of the peripheral, intimate and disruptive. From here, Nhi seeks how these absent stories open up critical imaginings of how we collectively observe and construct the world around us.

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