Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai and friends at Nguyen Art Foundation
By Tam Nguyen

‘No more, not yet’ is the third exhibition organised by the Nguyen Art Foundation, and translates the narratives of lives on the social margins into an elaborate, yet haunting showcase. Curated by Bill Nguyen, the exhibition marks an important milestone of Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai’s ethnographic practice. Spanning across two venues, the first part of the exhibition presents Nguyễn’s extended studies of a Vietnamese floating village on Tonlé Sap lake, located between Siem Riep and Pursat, Cambodia since 2014. Here, the artist's desire to give representation to the otherwise anonymous, deprived of tangible histories also entails rich insights into the making of socially engaged art.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai, 'ID Card’, 2014, heat transfer printing on recycled fabric, 5.7 x 8.1cm each, installation view of ‘No more, not yet – Part 1’. Image courtesy of the Nguyen Art Foundation

The first and most striking work of this venue is ‘ID Card’ (2014), reflecting the artist’s observation of the fleeting identity of more than 400 Vietnamese families from Tonlé Sap floating village. Many were immigrants, who, upon settling in, only carried along a membership card issued by the General Association of Vietnamese Cambodians. In a presentation for Kết Dòng Phù Sa programme (2022), Nguyễn shared images of those membership cards with the audiences. Some of them dated back to the nineties, and barely maintained their physical shapes.

With their names tethered to a piece of paperwork, the immigrants’ nationality remained unknown to either country. Responding to this idea, the work includes 348 units made of pieces of clothing fabric that the artist collected over the years from the residents. With these new cards, Nguyễn creates an archival vessel within the gallery space where the oil stains, patches, and tears are the immigrants’ most candid traces of existence. Restoring a narrative-rich materiality that is inherently absent in legal documents, ‘ID Card’ (2014) becomes a confrontation between one fictional gesture and a mythic sovereignty.

“With these new cards, Nguyen creates an archival vessel within the gallery space where the oil stains, patches, and tears are the immigrants’ most candid traces of existence.”

‘Edge of the Citadel,’ installation view of ‘No more, not yet – Part 2’. Image courtesy of the Nguyen Art Foundation.

This confrontational gesture takes on a collectivised exegesis in the second part of the exhibition. ‘Edge of the Citadel’ is an ongoing community-based project that started in Hue, Vietnam in 2021. The project involved Nguyễn and fellow artists living and producing art with local people across the walls of the ancient Hue Royal Citadel. This was where thousands of residents had been relocated to a resettlement, due to a mass renovation campaign issued by the government two years earlier. Questioning the troubled relationship between statehood and citizenry, ‘Edge of the Citadel’ offers an artistic contour of local memories on the one hand, and a contemplation of their ephemeral future on the other.

Lê Thị Minh Nguyệt & Nguyễn Thị Khánh Anh, 'A Little Green Afternoon’, 2022, fabric-covered, hand-bound dó paper notebook, ink, photographs, 20.5 x 30 x 1.8cm. Image courtesy of the Nguyen Art Foundation.

Starting with Lê Thị Minh Nguyệt and Nguyễn Thị Khánh Anh’s ‘A Little Green Afternoon’ (2022), viewers are met by an influx of stories about beauties and ruins. The work takes the form of an artist’s book, narrating the mundane routines of the community members in the manner of a collective memoir. In its making, the book was passed on from one person to another, completely filled with handwriting and watercolour sketches. Flipping through the pages of the work, we catch glimpses of a poetic, yet evacuated resilience of the Citadel wall’s residents standing against the dated displacement. However, Đào Tùng’s moving image on the opposite wall would illuminate the nature of this dispute as all but a zero-sum game.

Đào Tùng, 'A Game or We Were Born to be Loser’, 2022, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:14:00, installation view of ‘No more, not yet – Part 2’. Image courtesy of the Nguyen Art Foundation.

Đào Tùng’s 'A Game or We Were Born to be Loser’ (2022) imagines a rather metaphoric and childish version of this relocating system, where the fate of the people become subject to arbitrariness and snap decisions. The video shows footages of people playing a game called ‘Majority Wins’ on an unnamed beach. Each round sees a loser or two blatantly stepping away from the group and swimming away to the horizon, with new players entering the game in turn. At any spot in the gallery space, one does not quite escape the sound of water waves crashing onto the shore, ominously radiating from the video art, threatening to wash away the people’s stories.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai, 'Open Station/Trạm Mở’, 2023, an experimental space, a library that provides contextual resources, a hub for dialogue, installation view of ‘No more, not yet – Part 1’. Image courtesy of the Nguyen Art Foundation.

Omitting wall labels altogether, the exhibition may cause viewers to feel obliged to visit ‘Open Station’ (2023) for their last stop. The section concludes one’s viewing experience in an intellectually stimulating endnote with essays, fieldnotes, and thought exchanges between the artist and the curator. In ‘Open Station’, one finds Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai constantly humbling herself towards the stories she has encountered. ‘No more, not yet’ is a thoughtfully curated educational project, and is an example of artistic transparency when working with marginalised communities.

While it is not an easy exhibition to navigate, ‘No more, not yet’ can be considered an open archive of a community that unfolds and regenerates when we interact with it. Concerning monumental issues regarding immigration, displacement, and identity politics, the exhibition highlights the creative rationales of participating artists with rapt attention paid to process-centric details. In retrospect, the split into two venues works well curatorially, for it offers a much-needed break from the influx of haunting stories that ‘No more, not yet’ has to tell.

‘No more, not yet’ is organised with the curatorial directives of Bill Nguyễn, Nhật Q. Võ and Thái Hà. The exhibition remains on-view at EMASI Nam Long and Van Phuc, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam until June 2023.

About the Writer

Tam Nguyen (he/they) is an emerging art writer and poet based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He has published on various platforms such as diaCRTICS (US), Queer Southeast Asia (Singapore), and SEAM - Yale University (US). Tam is currently a senior at Fulbright University Vietnam, and an alumni of "Terms and Conditions of Writing and Publishing Art in Southeast Asia" workshop in 2021.