May Open Studio
07 pm – 09 pm, Thurs 29 May 2025
A. Farm studios
6/4 Nguyễn Đăng Giai, Thảo Điền, HCMC
From the organizer:
A. Farm and Goethe-Institut HCMC are delighted to invite you to May Open Studio—an evening of work-in-progress presentations by residents Shiro Masuyama, Linh VH Nguyen, and Thom Nguyen, taking place this Thursday, 29/7 at A. Farm studios.
For all three artists, this marks their first residency in Vietnam and their first time living in Saigon for an extended period. Over the past month, while navigating the rhythms of this city, each artist has managed to develop their own artistic experiments that expand their own practices through the impressions, materials and encounters unique to Saigon’s dynamic landscape.
While Japanese artist Shiro Masuyama — currently based in Belfast, Northern Ireland — playfully explores and complicates notions of national identity through a humorous juxtaposition between traditional Vietnamese water puppetry and mass-produced universal cartoon characters, Vietnamese-Canadian artist Linh VH Nguyen engages in a ritualistic and visceral process of cyanotype. Through a large-scale collage built from over 100 family photographs, printed on paper and fabric using analog and experimental darkroom techniques, Linh investigates how memory is stored, fractured, and released across generations — with each image acting as both portal and residue. Also working with the theme of identity, but through the lens of queer Vietnamese experience, Boston-based Vietnamese American artist Thom Nguyen presents a series of paintings titled “Nước | Water Resistance”, grounded in the double meaning of nước — water and nation in Vietnamese. Using the material and metaphorical properties of water, Thom’s project meditates on visibility, fluidity, and resistance.
About the artists
Shiro Masuyama is originally from Japan. His artistic practice has mainly developed through attending residencies worldwide, including Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany (2023); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (2008); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2004–2005); and ISCP—International Studio and Curatorial Programme, New York (2002–2003). He moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, after completing international residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland (2006), and Flax Art Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland (2009), and has been based there ever since. As an artist from Japan who has made their home in Northern Ireland, he is in a unique position to question how identity can be influenced by the dominant political forces surrounding us. He has attended numerous exhibitions worldwide, including ‘BIENALSUR 2021’, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rosario, Argentina (2021); ‘Aichi Triennale 2013’, Nagoya, Japan (2013). For his residency at A. Farm, Masuyama receives a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Linh VH Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese-Canadian visual artist whose practice centers on photo-based work, both analog and digital, including cyanotype. She also works with installation to explore themes of transformation, memory, and belonging. Often using discarded materials, she questions who defines value and what gets left behind. Trash, to her, is a clue — revealing the systems that produce it and offering a chance to imagine alternatives. She has received support from the City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts, and her work is held in private collections internationally. Her work has been exhibited at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, Ottawa Art Gallery – Annex, AXENÉO7, and Digital Arts Resource Centre. This is her first international residency and part of an evolving body of work on diasporic identity, intergenerational memory, and creative reuse. She is based on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory (Ottawa).
Thom Nguyen (b. 1987, HCMC, Vietnam) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation to explore queerness, diasporic memory, and the aesthetics of resistance. His practice engages material transformation as a way to question structures of identity, power, and belonging. Thom Nguyen is a visual artist based in Scituate, Massachusetts. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the U.S. and internationally, including at the Levitate Foundation, Rowan Artist Group, Santa Clara University, Project One Gallery, The San Francisco Academy of Sciences, and Substrate Gallery. Notable exhibitions include his “Divorce” series and “Nocturne Electronica” With a career spanning over a decade, Nguyen explores themes of visibility, transformation, and queerness through his art.
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