Performance poetry, filmmaking, ceramics
By Dan Tran

Linh San is a Hanoi-based artist working with words, moving images, and ceramics. She has a way with discovering and activating peculiar affordances of artistic media to capture and transform her sentiments of life into forms of affect.

Born and raised in the coastal province of Thái Bình at the heart of the Red River Delta of Vietnam, Linh San moved to Hanoi in 2016 for her undergraduate studies in Literature at the Hanoi National University of Education. Since then, she has been part of the local art community in various capacities, first as coordinator and manager for art programmes by Heritage Space and Hanoi DocLab, and then as a practitioner of performance poetry, filmmaking, and ceramics.

Linh San at a poetry performance in 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Six Space.

Linh San’s literary works often take the form of prose poetry, very much a reflection of her way of thinking — a stream of thoughts and mental images gushing through terrains of narratives and emotions connected via imaginative links. Her writing is rich in recollections, offering snippets into her experiences of daily life interspersed with personal thoughts and subjective commentaries. One can find Linh San’s poems on local and international platforms, including AJAR Press, Asian American Writer Workshop, Big Read Miami Project 2022, and Poetry Translation Centre.

Still from ‘Isle of Faces’ (2021) by Linh San. Image courtesy of the artist.

The observational, contemplative quality of her literary endeavours is similarly a key characteristic of Linh San’s filmic practice. Drawing from the vocabulary of documentary and experimental cinema, her films are not just vignettes of the everyday, but also the outcome of a subjectivised body orientating and manoeuvring itself against the local geographic realities. Most recently, her film ‘Isle of Faces’ was screened at Jakarta Biennale 2021 as part of the ‘Ring Project #1: Metaphors About Islands’. Assembled from past photographic and videographic materials, the film is a compendium of faces rendered absent by the alienating conditions of the COVID19 pandemic.

Linh San, ‘nights’, 2022 - ongoing, porcelain, variable dimensions. Installation view of ‘no longer holding a cloud’. Photo by Đỗ Văn Hoàng. Image courtesy of the artist and Á Space.

The solo exhibition ‘no longer holding a cloud’ (2022) marks Linh San’s decisive break into ceramics. Objects from her family and personal life are extracted from their real-life sightings, recreated in plain, off-white porcelain, and put on display across the two levels of Á Space’s humble abode. Entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted with ‘nights’ (2022), an installation of letters dedicated to her father and written retrospectively using physical states of paper sheets. The deft rendition of thinness and crumpled textures in clay confounds presumed formal conventions of the material, testifying to Linh San’s mastery of it.

Linh San, ‘Fibre-cement Roof Sheets’, 2022, three sheets of porcelain clay and paper pulp, 0.5 x 90 x 120cm each, installation view of ‘no longer holding a cloud’. Photo by Đỗ Văn Hoàng. Image courtesy of the artist and Á Space.

On the rooftop courtyard of Á Space lies ‘Fibre-cement Roof Sheets’ (2022), which is modelled after the lid of a rooftop tank container at the artist’s home. As the referenced roof sheets have been swept away by a storm, the creation of this work is necessarily a product of Linh San’s imaginative faculty in recalling and transforming memories of her family life into a more enduring form. However, the work is made with unfired clay and susceptible to decomposition caused by rain and sunlight, thus reflexively alluding back to its genesis.

The poetics of this mundane yet suggestive object harks back to her earlier written poem ‘nhà không mái che’ [my roofless home]. This reprises what is unique about Linh San. An idea, a memory, a feeling gets a hold of the artist, and percolates through the interstices of the artist’s sensibilities and enters the realm of art, each time not quite different, not quite the same, for time and time again.

Click here to read our dialogue with Linh San, where she talks about her transition from literature and educational role to becoming an artist, taking inspiration from paper making technique to make ceramics and rooting for capable artists in the Vietnamese contemporary art scene.