Phụ Lục Project: Those Fifteen Years

03 pm – 05 pm, Sun 30 Nov 2025
EMASI Nam Long
No. 147, Street no. 8, Nam Long Residential Area, Tan Thuan Ward (D7), HCMC
Registration link
Language: Vietnamese

From the organizer:

On the evening of 18 November 2025, the artist collective Phụ Lục began their North–South journey aboard the SE1 train, carrying their works to prepare for the installation of the exhibition Phụ Lục, how are you?, scheduled to arrive in Saigon at dawn on 20 November 2025. However, on the night of 19 November, the train was halted in Quang Ngai due to a historic spell of torrential rain in Central Vietnam – compounded by an unannounced release of water from a hydropower dam – which caused widespread flooding and severe damage to the railway tracks.

After various adversities, Phụ Lục have finally arrived in the sun-washed South, on a relief car departing from Dieu Tri Station (Gia Lai province). The journey feels almost allegorical to Phụ Lục’s artistic practice, one shaped by improvisation, contingency, persistence.

In this conversation, the Phụ Lục Project will be illuminated from three intersecting perspectives: first, from the members of Phụ Lục themselves, as they look back on their own past and current practice; second, from the perspective of curator Van Do, who has traced, contextualized, and translated their evolving 15-year practice; and finally, from the position of artist Phan Thao Nguyen, who speaks as a viewer, a colleague of the same generation, one who has witnessed Phụ Lục’s presence within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese art.

The conversation opens up interwoven entry points into contemporary art histories, performance practices, and their cultural contexts, while fostering dialogue across generations – those who have grown alongside one another, questioned shared urgencies, and continued in parallel within different historical, social, and creative conditions.
The talk takes place at the EMASI Nam Long Gymnasium, which also served as the filming site for Phụ Lục’s performance Độc ẩm (Solo Drinking), a new commission created especially for the exhibition Phụ Lục, how are you? (EMASI Nam Long) as part of the Phụ Lục Project.

Phụ Lục was founded in 2010 in Hanoi by six artists—Nguyen Huy An, Vu Duc Toan, Nguyen Song, Ngo Thanh Bac, Hoang Minh Duc, and Nguyen Duong Hai Dang—and remains one of the few active performance art collectives in Vietnam today. Known for their durational, repetitive, and sometimes absurd group performances, Phụ Lục often employs everyday objects as allegorical props and stages their works in abstract settings. Their practice evokes social issues while addressing personal concerns through a language of minimal yet affective gestures.

Van Do is a curator and writer from Hanoi, Vietnam whose practice explores how sites, in their physical, socio-political, and affective dimensions, can serve as both artistic and curatorial material. Through architectural interventions and site-responsive commissions, she activates and examines these spaces across institutional, alternative, and independent contexts. Her ongoing research focuses on the re-enactment of performance as a method for speculative historiography, developed in close collaboration with Hanoi-based performance artists. Upcoming texts will appear in post-moma, NUS Press, Art & Market, and Movement Research Performance Journal.

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.

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