How Do You Read?
‘Library (Anthology for Beginners)’ by Trong Gia Nguyen
By Quyên Hoàng
This is a winning entry from the fourth Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.
‘Library (Anthology for Beginners)’ is the name of Trong Gia Nguyen’s ongoing series of installations. Since 2007, the Vietnamese-American artist (b. 1971, Saigon) has been inscribing on rice grains words from chapters of books that belong to his personal library. The sorites for each literary title is then encased in a transparent acrylic container that takes on the all-too-familiar look and dimension of a library checkout card. These undulating, granular, boxed-in dissections are afterwards mounted linearly on exhibition walls. Most recently, they were part of Galerie Quỳnh’s ‘Notes on Paper: Group Exhibition’ (2022).
‘Notes on Paper: A Group Exhibition’, 2022, installation view. Image courtesy of Galerie Quynh.
The series has encapsulated and currently consists of chapters from nearly 40 literary works. With a few exceptions in French (Jules Laforgue, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) and Italian (Dante Alighieri), the words religiously imposed by Nguyen on individual rice kernels are English and cover a constellation of writers across genres, centuries and continents: Chinua Achebe, Hans Christian Andersen, Jane Austen, William Blake, Italo Calvino, Miguel de Cervantes, Roald Dahl, Fyodor Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Kahlil Gibran, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, Naguib Mahfouz, Ovid, Arundhati Roy, Maurice Sendak, William Shakespeare, Bram Stoker, Voltaire, E. B. White, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf. The list goes on.
Trong Gia Nguyen, ‘Roy: The God of Small Things’, etched acrylic, rice kernels, ink, 14.9 x 9.5 x 1.3cm. Image courtesy of Galerie Quynh.
– alphabetically
– by continent or country
– by colour
– by date of acquisition
– by date of publication
– by format
– by genre
– by major periods of literary history
– by language
– by priority for future reading
– by binding
– by series
No less intimately and perhaps a bit more congruent in form perceptible – to this writer (during her first encounter of the work), Nguyen’s rice-laden “library” evokes the premise of Whisper of the Heart, the 1995 Ghibli animation, wherein the teenage heroine/aspiring writer – while perusing her library books’ checkout cards – noticed the name of a certain stranger who, apparently, had borrowed the same books as hers. The suspect would turn out to be – unsurprisingly, and for lack of better word – her soulmate. And isn’t it true that in social interactions, our likelihood to connect with or take a liking to or change our opinion of someone can largely depend on what kind of books they read?
No matter how endeared and indispensable our personal attachment and ascribed meanings to books are, the reality remains that no exact copy of a book can exist in two places at the same time. Neither can it simultaneously stay at your place and mine, nor that every library in the world (public and private) possess every book that the other has in their catalogue. While they might come from the same printer, set in the same typeface, bound in the same cover design and share the same number of pages, a physical copy of a book would doubtless take on a patina of time – the result of its owner’s reading habits and personal ponderings – during its change-of-hands lifespan: dog-eared creases, pencilled underlines, polka dots of moulds, careworn papers the colours of sands.
Just as books are borrowable, and their properties malleable, all knowledge is borrowed according to the Indian philosopher Osho. In Vietnamese, we have a term called học gạo (lit. “rice learning”), colloquially employed to denote a manner of study in which students cram and devour indiscriminately, uncritically textbooks so they can survive hard-pressed examinations that will make or break their future in getting into a good university.
And with ‘Library’, Nguyen’s main medium of choice – rice grains – is deliciously ripe with layered associations. Isn’t it the staple of “more than 3.5 billion people around the world, particularly in Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa”? It is nourishment that sustains our livelihood – not too far off when one describes the meaning of books to their lives. But instead of an easy-to-digest, melted-down, swallowed-whole meal such as a dish of flavourful biryani, velvety congee, or sweet cơm tấm – Vietnamese broken rice, often served with grilled pork chops and pickled vegetables – Nguyen’s “library” is a deconstruction. His bifurcation – of the ingredients that make a literary work, its text and contexts, what it is – is not unlike the practice of Michelin-starred chefs. In imposing on an ingredient essentially integral to the non-Western world English words that bear “anglo-linguistic violence”, Nguyen evokes in us questions regarding the current state of power structure when it comes to knowledge. After all, knowledge is power!
“But instead of an easy-to-digest, melted-down, swallowed-whole meal such as a dish of flavourful biryani, velvety congee, or sweet cơm tấm – Vietnamese broken rice, often served with grilled pork chops and pickled vegetables – Nguyen’s “library” is a deconstruction. ”
Mind you, of all the books and authors featured in Nguyen’s “library”, this writer has only read one-third; and in her casual observation, less than a handful of them have been translated and published in Vietnam in recent decades – their significance hardly counted or featured in our country’s social, compulsory curriculum from primary to high school. Not unlike independent, artist-initiated art spaces in Vietnam such as Sàn Art, Dia Projects and Bay Library, I don’t rely on public libraries. A decade ago, a visit to the General Sciences Library of Ho Chi Minh City left me disappointed for its want of depth and variety. Instead, we choose to build, fill in and curate our own structure of knowledge from the ground up, bit by bit, length by length, width by width, depth by depth.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M or the prize sponsors.
1 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Penguin Classics, Great Britain, 2000, 78.
2 Georges Perec, ‘Brief Note on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books’, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin, London, 1999, 148-155.
3 Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, Picador, United States of America, 2003, 35.
About the Writer
Quyên Hoàng is an independent writer from Ho Chi Minh City. Covering art, design, and fashion, she has contributed to Design Anthology, ArtAsiaPacific, ArtsEquator, Ran Dian, and written for magazines and online media in Vietnam such as Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Luxuo, Saigoneer, and Vietcetera.
