Arts & Culture - Saigoneer

How Vietnam's Muslims Celebrate Ramadan, Eid Al-Fitr in Mekong Delta's Châu Đốc

2026-03-10T15:00:00+07:00

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, yet Vietnamese Muslims represent as little as 0.1% of the country’s population. Most are ethnic Chăm, while a few are foreigners and a few converts. After traveling to Châu Đốc in An Giang Province, where the majority are located, I was mesmerized by the unique cultural mix this community represents.

I visited a few times during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. Muslims around the world celebrate this holy month by praying during the night time and abstaining from eating, drinking, and sexual acts between sunrise and sunset. In 2019, Ramadan finishes on June 4, with Eid al-Fitr taking place on June 5. It is believed the Quran’s first verse was revealed during this period of the year.

At the end of Ramadan, the Chăm Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr, which translates literally as the “break-fast festival,” by wearing new clothes, visiting relatives and gathering food. Kids play with candles and new toys while young people stay up all night. Many also choose to get married during the festival.

In Châu Đốc, wedding celebrations go on for three days. People visit the family of the bride and groom to congratulate them, enjoy traditional green tea and eat snacks. On the final day, the groom goes together with his family and friends to the bride’s house for a celebration. It lasts for hours and culminates in the announcement that they are now husband and wife.

The following photos represent the daily life of the Chăm people during Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr:

Sunset over the Mekong River in Châu Đốc, where many families live in floating houses.

Family restaurants could be found around the village

A Việt-Muslim family.

Old people waiting for the sun to set before breaking their fast.

Kids and young men playing traditional games just before the sunset.

The backyard of a mosque where people get together to play games.

Men gathering together to break their fast.

Men and women gather to pray Taraweeh, an extra prayer that is usually only performed during the nights of the holy month of Ramadan.

The night is the only time when Muslims can eat and drink during the month of Ramadan so fried food and nước mía stalls open late.

Kids play with candles during the night.

Joining the bride or groom’s family to drink green tea and to congratulate them during the three-day wedding celebrations.

The bride and groom in their house finally announced as husband and wife.

This article was originally published on Urbanist Hanoi in 2019.

A Brief History of Ông Đồ, Vietnam’s Scholars Whose Calligraphy Is Highly Sought After

2026-03-02T14:00:00+07:00

To say that Tết gathers together everything most beautiful in Vietnamese culture would not be an exaggeration. More than a threshold between the old year and the new, it is also a time when people feel they can return to, and relive, the traditional values that define them.

It is there in those year-end markets, where one searches for the familiar flavors of home. It is there in the square bánh chưng, shaped like the earth, and the cylindrical bánh tét, round like the sky. These are humble offerings, yet deeply reverent, placed before one’s ancestors. And on the afternoon of the 23^th day of the last lunar month, families erect cây nêu (tall bamboo pole) in front of their homes. A small wind chime hangs from it, trembling in the breeze as a quiet gesture meant to ward off misfortune.

Whenever strips of red paper begin to appear along Hàng Mã Street, I find myself thinking of ông đồ who once wrote characters on dó paper. What does the person who comes to ask for a character truly seek, if not something beyond a few strokes of calligraphy? And what does the giver offer, if not something beyond a flourish of black ink?

Silk robes and scholar caps

In the Confucian civil service examination system, candidates who passed three rounds and earned the degree of Tú Tài, a licentiate-level qualification, were known as “ông đồ.” Many never entered official service. Those who advanced only through the lower examinations would continue preparing for higher rounds such as thi Hội (the metropolitan exam) and thi Đình (the palace exam). In the meantime, they often supported themselves by teaching, hence the name “thầy đồ,” literally "scholar-teacher,” or by writing on commission.

Ông đồ reading, 1915. Photo by Léon Busy.

In the book Traditional Vietnamese Customs, compiled by Toan Ánh, a passage reads: “Elementary learning had no state-run schools, yet in every village there were a few ông đồ who taught children. Books were handwritten, as printed books were very expensive. Every ông đồ kept a small library, and students copied their lessons from the master’s books…”

Being recognized as an ông đồ required more than just wearing a traditional robe and knowing how to write. The title was reserved for those who possessed both literary skill and wisdom. Even if they had not achieved high academic honors, they maintained their integrity, lived honestly, and followed tradition. This was because, in earlier times, education was seen as a way to learn not only how to read and write but also how to be a person of virtue. The scholar was a symbol of intellect and character in society. People revered them not just for their elegant brushwork but for their clear conscience and steadfast values.

Tấm tắc ngợi thiên tài: / Praise for his genius:
Hoa tay thảo những nét / His gifted hand sketches strokes
Như phượng múa, rồng bay / Like phoenixes dancing, like dragons flying
— ‘Ông đồ’ by Vũ Đình Liên

In the past, people sought out ông đồ when they needed “special scripts” (xin chữ) or someone literate to help with formal documents. This gave rise to the tradition of requesting and giving calligraphy. During festivals and especially at Tết, students and those devoted to study would ask for specific characters as a way of absorbing good fortune and intellectual blessing.

There was an unspoken etiquette to asking for a script. The petitioner would bring a modest offering such as betel and areca, tea, or tobacco, and come to the scholar’s home. The scholar, in turn, had to be solemn and respectful, giving his art only to those who truly valued the written word, rather than those merely pretending to be cultured.

Ông đồ on the street of Hanoi, 1913–1917. Photo by Léon Busy.

Characters were written in calligraphic form and rendered on many styles on sheets of red paper. Red, in eastern belief, is the color of luck and auspicious beginnings. The writer would let mood and instinct guide the brush, shaping letters into forms that were sometimes striking, sometimes unexpected. Each character that emerged beneath the scholar’s hand was more than a work of calligraphic art. It carried temperament, personality, feeling, and the distinct creative imprint of the individual who wrote it.

A word worth a thousand in gold

The old saying “nhất tự thiên kim,” meaning “one character [is] worth a thousand gold pieces,” is associated with Lü Buwei, as recorded in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. The powerful Chinese chancellor once hung his book at the capital gate and offered a reward of gold to anyone who could add or remove a single character. His authority was so immense that no one dared step forward to revise it. Over time, the phrase became a classical allusion to writing of exceptional value.

Beyond its physical form, the written character is a means by which humanity preserves memory, opens understanding, and connects across time. That is why words are likened to gold. Dr. Cung Khắc Lược, a veteran calligrapher, explains: “Thought, emotion, and the inner life are always expressed through language, through vocabulary, through text. A single character written on a page, a word from the heart and mind offered to another, is worth a thousand gold pieces. It surpasses material wealth.”

Ông đồ stationed in front of Hương Pagoda, Hanoi, 1995. Photo via Flickr user lonqueta.

Over the years, the practice of asking for characters has grown more widespread, becoming a cherished custom each time Tết returns. From the mountains to the delta, regardless of wealth or status, anyone who comes with sincerity may ask for a character.

Each brushstroke carries a particular wish or intention. One might request Cát Tường (auspiciousness) or Như Ý (fulfillment) to pray for peace within the family. Others ask for Phát, Lộc (prosperity, fortune), or Tài (excellence) in hopes that their work will prosper and unfold smoothly. Young people often request for Chí (resolve) or Đắc (achievement) as a way to steady themselves in the face of hardship.

The ritual is no longer bound by the formalities of the past. The giver need not be an elderly scholar in traditional robes with silvered hair and beard. There are now modern calligraphers, western-trained writers, and women who are taking up the brush.

The art, too, has moved beyond black ink on red paper. Characters are carved or brushed onto wood, stone, bamboo, silk, or brocade. Seal script, clerical script, regular script, cursive, running script, every form has its place. Along city streets and in temple courtyards, people queue patiently for characters that unfurl across the page like phoenixes in flight and dragons in motion, a beautiful custom that feels inseparable from the first days of the new year.

Modern calligraphic masters come from all walks of life. Photo by Alberto Prieto.

Dedicated “scholar streets” have also emerged to honor this traditional custom. In the north, the Temple of Literature is widely regarded as a symbolic “village of examination candidates.” In the south, the practice of asking for calligraphic characters dates back to the 17^th century, when the Nguyễn lords expanded southward to develop new territories, followed by waves of migrants from the north and central regions. It was not until the late 17^th century, however, when Chinese communities began settling and cultivating the areas around Biên Hòa and Đồng Nai, that the custom truly flourished. The long coexistence of different cultures has, in subtle ways, shaped the distinctive character of this southern tradition.

Today, more than half of the calligraphy masters are students of classical Sino-Vietnamese studies or simply lovers of the art. Those who come to request characters span every age group, social background, and profession. This is not a fleeting trend. I see it as an act of cultural transmission. Whatever changes in form or setting, the essence of the custom remains intact. The person holding the brush pours care and craft into every stroke. The one who asks comes with respect for learning and for the traditions that have shaped it.

Photo by Alberto Prieto.

[Top image by Léon Busy.]

Review: 'New Wave' Documentary Is a Surprisingly Personal Dissection of 1980s Nostalgia

2026-02-23T10:00:00+07:00

Melodic synth-lines and steady electronic drums. Today, the signature sounds of new wave music feel perhaps a bit old and outdated. During its high point during the 1980s, however, new wave was hailed as music of the future.

Vietnamese new wave, or new wave for short, is a genre of music that can be best described as Vietnamese American eurodisco. Characterized by a blend of synth pop and disco beats, the music most often covers famous eurodisco hits from abroad. In fact, the term new wave had originally been a bit of a misnomer. The name stuck around when eurodisco music, especially in its burgeoning phases, was miscategorized under the label of UK New Wave in record shops across Little Saigon.

As Elizabeth Ai describes in her book New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora that accompanied the release of her documentary film, new wave “electrified” a whole generation of Vietnamese American teenagers during the 1980s. Specifically, new wave was revered by the so-called “1.5 generation,” referring to the generation of Vietnamese American refugees who were born in Vietnam but grew up and came of age in the US. For the 1.5 generation — lost trying to navigate a new life between America and Vietnam, neither to which they felt like they wholly belonged — new wave offered a new way of life. It was a way of rebelling and reinventing against and of expectations and identity categories of what it meant to be Vietnamese, Americans, refugees: seeking refuge from war, yes, but also from the refugee experience itself.

New wave embodies the broad-minded, quixotic, and highly individualistic spirits that guided youths from the 1980s.

Unfortunately, the popularity of new wave is now largely subdued. But those who experienced new wave during its height seem to be unable to forget the excitement, fervor, and zeal that it incited within the Vietnamese diaspora.

About the film

The documentary New Wave is directed by Elizabeth Ai, a Chinese Vietnamese American Emmy-winning producer and filmmaker. It was originally released in 2024, and has so far only been available for watching through screenings. Good news for us, starting late spring of this year, the documentary will be available for the public. Ai’s team recommended following socials for details to be released in the near future.

Interestingly, while the film project began in 2018, initially with research and outreach work and eventually moving onto filmwork, with the COVID-19 pandemic, filming unexpectedly came to an abrupt halt. While filming was on hiatus, Ai’s team started an Instagram page to crowdsource archival material. Saigoneer featured the project during this phase back in 2022, read our previous article here. Now, the instagram page has been taken over with promotional content for the film, but the montage of crowdsourced photos, depicting Vietnamese American youth during the 1980s and their stories, still remains available for public view.

The poster of New Wave the documentary.

As it should be obvious by now, new wave and its history is the central topic of Ai’s film: the origins of the music, the story of its rise in popularity amongst the Vietnamese diaspora, the ascent of its poster child Lynda Trang Đài into stardom, as well as its punk subculture scene: edgy clothes, electric hair, and late night dancing and partying. In describing her childhood memories of her aunts and uncles listening to new wave music, Ai captured the subculture of new wave succinctly.

There was this DIY, scrappy aesthetic that revolved around the music they were listening to. I think the beautiful part of it is that it's a hybrid culture they created; the youth who lost their homeland didn't quite identify as Vietnamese-only anymore, and they were so new to America, and they weren't accepted by Americans, so they had to figure out an identity all their own. I think that was what made this subculture so unique, the music was neither American or Vietnamese, and it sounded like the future with its synthesized instrumentation.

New Wave’s story is no simple periodization of the music. Instead, the film intimately follows and weaves together the lives of a few central figures to paint a lively and dynamic picture of the inner life of new wave. There is, for one, Ian Nguyen, better known as DJ BPM, a prominent new wave DJ who, as a teenager, against the disappointment of his strict father, fell in love with new wave both for its futuristic sound and its new possibilities for “cool.” Then there is Lynda Trang Đài, dubbed by some as the “Vietnamese Madonna,” who pioneered new wave and became massively popular and idolized through her appearances in Paris by Night covering popular eurodisco hits. And finally, there is Elizabeth Ai herself; as well as her aunt Myra, who took care of Ai growing up in the absence of her mother, who was too busy hustling to provide for the family. For viewers both familiar with new wave and entirely new to it, the film’s intimate documentation of the inner lives of insiders of the world of new wave is deeply captivating. Together, their lives come to form a vibrant mosaic image of the world that is new wave.

Lynda Trang Đài was a key figure in the new wave movement.

That said, compared to Ian and Lynda whose lives have long revolved around new wave, Ai’s connection to new wave is arguably far sparser, anchored primarily in childhood memories of listening to the music blasting in her teenage aunt Myra’s car. Why, then, is Ai’s personal story and history figured so prominently in the film? Ai herself could not anticipate her intimate link to the narrative when she first embarked on her project: “Initially envisioned as a documentary focused on the 1980s new wave scene, the project deepened as I explored stories and archives, which unexpectedly reopened old wounds and broadened the emotional scope of the film.” She elaborates:

During the filming journey of this documentary, I encountered a profound transformation in my relationship with the participants, which became one of the most intriguing and moving aspects of the process. Initially, I saw myself strictly as the filmmaker and viewed them as subjects, maintaining a professional distance. However, as we progressed, this distance gradually diminished. The participants, first-generation Vietnamese Americans, openly shared their traumatic experiences with me. They spoke of the heavy burdens they had carried for years: stories of displacement, loss, and resilience. As they shared, I realized that despite being a second-generation Vietnamese American, our experiences were not so different. I, too, had been carrying a significant amount of emotional baggage, perhaps unconsciously. There was a moment when it no longer felt right to merely document their stories without acknowledging my own. It seemed unfair to ask them to reveal so much without addressing the truths within myself.

In perhaps the most memorable sequence of the film, realizing she can no longer avoid confronting the painful fact of her mother’s absence during her childhood, Ai finally reaches out to reconnect with her mother, with whom she has long had no contact out of anger and resentment. And in finally confronting her mother, Ai realizes that she has misunderstood much of her own mother, that she had not known much of what caused her mother to act the way she did. Thus, what began as a film about a music genre ends up transforming into something much more intimate and personal.

A confession

Admittedly, I had never heard of new wave before watching Ai’s documentary. And given my lack of personal connection with the topic, I anticipated that my enjoyment of the film would be limited. Beyond such expectations, however, the film was a real joy to watch — in large part due to the personal aspects of the film that transcended the narrow scope of new wave, no doubt, but also, because the film left me with much to think about.

What exactly? Perplexingly enough, a quote, written in a substantially different context from New Wave, by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book The Message. “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Ai.

At one point in the film, Ian Nguyen describes his adolescent immersion in new wave, “the music was innocent, but the scene we were in was not.” The scene was not innocent in that it harbored alcohol, drugs, sex. The music was not, in that it didn’t — after all, the music was just music. It is certainly a compelling and intriguing characterization of the dichotomy of new wave, but I also think that it is one we can further complicate.

Consider, for instance, the film’s portrayal of Lynda Trang Đài. For many in the 1.5 generation, Lynda was an icon of glamor, freedom, and possibility, exemplified when Ai’s aunt Myra remarks, “She was everything I wanted to become.”

But if Lynda embodied perfection for many, the film also reveals the many ways in which Lynda’s personal life is in fact far from perfect. We see, for instance, the ways in which Lynda struggles to juggle multiple jobs (including running a sandwich shop) to financially support her extended family — all of which, at one point, causes her to miss her son’s graduation ceremony.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The star who promised escape for so many children from the dysfunction of overworked parents is herself trapped in a similar cycle. I mention all of this not to taint Lynda Trang Đài, but rather, in light of all of this, to raise the question: what, then, could innocence mean for new wave music when the craze over new wave had so often been inseparable from the craze over Lynda Trang Đài?

Vietnamese New Wave found its start in VHS and cassette tapes containing covers of trendy English-language songs of the time.

The film’s brilliance lies in this: far from simply romanticizing new wave, the film humanizes the phenomenon, from its past to its present, from its devout followers to its poster child, laying bare all its messiness and complexities. The larger picture is far from perfect, but we feel love for it all the more because of that. If there is anything innocent about new wave, it is this care for it.

To return to Coates: “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.” New Wave reminds me of these words because, in a way, the film feels like a confession of such imagining. “My truth was just a story I created to protect myself,” says Ai, reflecting upon the narrative she has constructed for herself to fill in her mother’s ellipses.

The same can be said of new wave more generally, too. If new wave subculture was driven by “rebellion and reinvention,” as goes the subtitle of Ai’s book, surely such reinvention also constituted a kind of imagining and reimagining. And New Wave shows us that, indeed, such imagining is most powerful when confessed because it is there, in that confession, that we can be most honest without letting go of the selves we’ve built.

On the Cusp of a Modern New Year, Reflections on a Simpler Tết Past

2026-02-13T10:00:00+07:00

Every year, as the pages from my block calendar peel off, bringing me towards another Vietnamese New Year, my mind once again fills with nostalgia about an old Tết. Tết in my memory begins with my childhood in a small house nestled under a coconut grove on the outskirts of Bạc Liêu in the Mekong Delta. Those were days of hardship, yet my parents worked hard so that Tết could bloom magnificently for all of us.

Born into the Year of the Buffalo (1973), I grew up during a time when poverty was common among Vietnamese people. Those who survived the war struggled to make ends meet. Everyone I knew didn’t have much to eat all year round, and children had to do all types of odd jobs to help put food on the table. Like all my friends, for the entire year I looked forward to Tết because it was the only time when we could eat good food and receive a new set of clothes, and even some lucky money.

A time to shed old leaves and apply new paint

In my memory, Tết preparations started months before the lunar year’s end. In September, my father tended our pond to make sure that our fish would be ready for Tết. We planted chilies, onions, cabbages and leafy vegetables, which my mother and I would bring to the market to sell in order to buy the many necessities for our celebrations: pork, dried green peas, sticky rice, dried shrimp, fruit, firecrackers, and offerings for the ancestors’ altar. If we were lucky, there would be enough money left for my parents to buy each of us — their three children — a new set of clothing.

A few weeks before Tết came, my father studied the weather patterns, talked to his friends and decided on the day to pluck the leaves of our apricot tree, mai. I watched in amazement as the barren tree started to sprout countless green buds which grew fuller and fuller as Tết drew nearer. My father monitored the watering and fertilizing of his tree every day to ensure they bloomed at the exact right time. As was true of the peach flowers we used to have in the north, if our mai blossoms bloomed brilliantly during the first day of Tết, our family would be blessed for that entire new year.

Regardless of how poor we were, Tết was the time to look and feel good, so every year, about two weeks before it arrived, we scrubbed and painted our house. My brothers and I moved our wooden and bamboo furniture out to the front yard and gave it a good wash, splashing water at each other while we worked. We then crawled into our most tattered clothes and covered our walls with a white paint we mixed ourselves using limestone powder and water. We laughed and joked while we worked, feeling happy as the gleaming white spread under our hands.

A family in Sa Đéc in the Mekong Delta with rows of apricot trees that are stripped off old leaves. Photo by Andy Ip.

After the house was scrubbed and cleaned, I spent hours helping my mother prepare a special pickled dish using onions and scallions we bought at the market. They had to be fresh, still attached to their leaves and roots. More importantly, they had to be bite-size. Bringing them home, we washed any dirt and mud away, then soaked them overnight in water diluted with ash I collected from our cooking stove (we cooked mostly with rice straw or tree branches during those days). The ashy water helped tame the onions and scallions so that the next morning they no longer made my eyes weep when I peeled off their outer layers to reveal their glistening whiteness. Sitting side-by-side with my mother in our front yard, I talked to her about our plans for the New Year, about the food we would cook, and whom my parents had chosen to be the first person to step into our house on the first day of Tết.

Many hours of squatting on low stools to prepare our pickled dish always made our backs sore, but as we spread the peeled onions and scallions out on thin tin trays to dry them in the sun, we felt happy to watch the white alliums grin back at us. They looked like flowers that had sprung up from the earth, like the purest type of beauty. While waiting for them to dry, I gathered small twigs to start a fire in our kitchen while my mother measured and mixed vinegar, sugar and salt into a pot.

Once it cooled, we poured the pickling liquid over our onions and scallions, which we had arranged artistically into glass jars. From time to time, I would help my mother carry these jars out to the sun, to make sure that our pickled onions and scallions would "ripen" in time for Tết. They always made the perfect side dish, to be savored with dried shrimp, sticky rice cakes, and boiled or stewed meat; their fragrant sour-sweetness melting in our mouths.

The week before Tết was the busiest, but also the happiest. One of the most exciting events was to drain our pond to harvest our fish. We had no motorized pump back then, only a bamboo bucket we connected to two strong ropes and took turns swinging to get the water out of the pond. Our hands would grow tired and hours passed before we saw fish jumping up and down, trying to escape the increasingly shallow water. Our pond was not large, but large enough to reveal different secrets each year. Besides the tilapia fish my father farmed, we also often found mullet, catfish and perch.

For quite a few years, I was not allowed to go into the drained pond to catch fish with my two elder brothers. Standing on the pond’s bank, I burned with jealousy as I watched my brothers jump around in the mud; their faces blackened, their teeth gleaming in the sunlight as they cheered and laughed. Each time a fish was captured they would scream with excitement, lift it high into the air while it wiggled madly, and then throw it on the floor.

My job was to scoop the jumping fish into a bamboo basket and release it into a large tin bucket filled with water. Sensing that I was unhappy, my parents would tell me that catching fish with your bare hands was not a task for a small girl like me. Of course, they were right. My brothers’ hands were often injured. One year, a catfish pierced its sharp thorn into my brother’s finger. He ran into the house and when I found him half an hour later, he was under his bed, clutching his hand to his chest, crying like a baby. I laughed at him so hard, but a few months later, I too was stung by a catfish’s thorn. The pain pierced into my bones, so hot, deep and searing, that I could not help but crawl under our bed and bawl like a newborn as well.

Candied coconut by any other name

Tết would not be fully ready without mứt dừa, a type of candied coconut ribbon. As someone with "monkey genes" who could climb well, I was tasked with the responsibility of picking several fresh coconuts from our trees. Our small garden was filled with fruit trees, and my favorite were the coconut trees that spread their protective arms over our house, singing us lullabies by rustling their green leaves against our tin roof. These coconut trees bore plenty of fruit all year round. I quickly got up to the top of a tree, leaned my body against the biggest leaf and selected the coconuts which gleamed with several golden stripes on their dark green skin. The flesh of these coconuts would be perfect: not too thin and not too crunchy. Hanging on to the tree with one hand, my other hand would swing a sharp knife to chop the chosen coconuts from their stems. They made happy thumping noise as they kissed the ground.

Just like catching fish for Tết, preparing candied coconut ribbons was a joyous family event. My father and brothers chopped and then peeled away the thick outer layers of the coconuts. We then drilled holes through the hard shells, tilting the fragrant juice into a large bowl. Later, my mother would reward each of us with a glass of delicious coconut water. The rest we would be put aside to make thịt kho trứng — pork and eggs stewed in coconut juice — an essential Tết dish that's common in the Mekong Delta.

Braised pork and bittergourd soup are two popular Tết dishes. Illustration by KAA Illustration via Behance.

Making candied coconut ribbons was fun, but it was also a test of our skills and patience. After separating the white coconut flesh from its hard shell, we peeled the brown, inner-skin away, then shaved the coconut flesh into thin, long ribbons that we dipped into hot water. After draining them, we mixed them with white sugar. Our neighbors often added food coloring to make red, pink and even green coconut ribbons, but we preferred ours to be white and natural.

After a few hours, when the sugar had completely dissolved into the ribbons, I would make a low fire in the kitchen for my mother to cook the coconut ribbons in a large frying pan. To help the sugar crystallize, she occasionally stirred the ribbons with a long pair of chopsticks, giving them an equal amount of heat while not breaking them. My job was to keep the fire very low, so as not to burn my favorite Tết dish. It was the most delicious job as I only needed to put out my tongue to taste the sweetness of Tết in the air. About an hour later, we would have a basket full of long, curly coconut ribbons, crystallized in their fragrance.

The craft behind bánh chưng

As the mai tree’s golden flowers started to bloom, a breeze would sweep across nearby rice fields and waft to my nose, whispering that Tết was about to knock on our door. With this aroma in the air, we made traditional sticky rice cakes, or bánh chưng. Bánh chưng is a must-have for northern Vietnamese during Tết. My parents, who had uprooted themselves from the north and planted themselves into the soil of southern Vietnam during the late 1970s, embraced their northern heritage by making bánh chưng every year while our southern neighbors prepared bánh tết.

Both of these sticky rice cakes use the same ingredients, including sticky rice, dried green peas and pork. However, bánh chưng is wrapped with lá dong (phrynium leaves), which grow abundantly in the north, while bánh tết is wrapped with lá chuối (banana leaves) which you can find anywhere in the south. In addition, bánh chưng is square and thick, while bánh tết is long and round. Lastly, while bánh tết can have a “sweet” version (made with sweetened bananas), bánh chưng only has a savory version that includes pork and green peas.

The night before the important day of making our bánh chưng, I helped my mother soak dried green peas overnight to remove their skin. We also soaked sticky rice and separated good grains from the brown and yellowish ones. My brothers squatted in the yard as they helped my father split bamboo stalks into thin, flat strings. These strings would be used to tie the leaves around our cakes. My mother explained that bánh chưng needed to be boiled for hours, so plastic or nylon strings would not be healthy.

Once these tasks were complete, my father would ask me to help him cut down lá dong leaves from our garden. When we moved south, he searched all over for dong plants, which were hard to find and harder to grow in the tropical climate. With these plants growing in our garden, we felt we had brought with us a part of our ancestors’ village. We cut the precious leaves from their stems, piled them up gently, and brought them to our yard to wash away any dirt and insects. We took care so that no leaf was torn. Softening them under the sun or over hot coal, we set them aside.

On a large working area, my mother spread out a clean, large straw mat. Onto the center of the mat we placed the dong leaves, bamboo strings, bowls of the drained sticky rice, dried green peas and marinated pork. As we had no fridge, my mother had to wake up at five that morning to go to the local market to buy the best pork available. It needed to be fresh, with a precise balance of lean meat and fat. Bringing it home, my mother washed and cut the pork into large pieces, then marinated it with freshly ground pepper, fish sauce and salt.

One of the extraordinary things about my father is that except for boiled or fried eggs, he can’t cook, yet is a master at making bánh chưng. While my mother, brothers and I struggled to form our bánh chưng into square shapes, using wooden molds to guide us, all my father needed was his bare hands.

He started by arranging several lá dong leaves on to the mat and placing a layer of sticky rice, green peas and marinated pork on top, which he then covered with another layer of green peas and sticky rice. Covering his artwork with several more lá dong leaves, he folded the four sides, tugging the leaves into each other so that they made a perfect square. He then tied the square cake with the bamboo strings he had made with my brothers.

Tranh Khúc Village in Hanoi is known for their special bánh chưng.

My father explained that the strings had to give space for the rice and dried green peas to expand when they cooked. Yet they had to be tight enough for the rice not to spill out. He said that in northern Vietnam, where the weather was cold around Tết and families didn’t have refrigerators, bánh chưng would be released immediately into deep wells after they were cooked. Resins from the lá dong leaves, once meeting the cold water, would form a thick protective layer over the cakes. The wells would act as refrigerators, keeping the cakes fresh for weeks.

My father was so famous for his bánh chưng-making skills that many of our relatives and friends often asked us to make bánh chưng for them. While there was a lot of work involved, we did not mind since it would be more economical to make and boil over 30 bánh chưng at one time, sufficient for seven families and for the entire duration of Tết.

After we were done with wrapping the bánh chưng, my mother took out a gigantic pot that she had borrowed from our rich neighbor. The pot was large and expensive, thus in our whole neighborhood, there was only one family who could afford it. Families took turns borrowing the pot to boil their bánh chưng and bánh tết. The owner was happy to lend it because although we were financially poor, we were rich with generosity towards each other.

For the boiling of bánh chưng, my brothers dug a hole in a corner of our garden and my father started a fire with the biggest logs he could find. It takes up to 10 hours for the bánh chưng to cook, and therefore, this was the only time all year that my brothers and I were allowed to stay up all night to look after the fire. We huddled against each other in the dark, telling scary ghost stories that made us giggle and huddle even closer to each other. In the early morning, we scooped out the small bánh chưng, which we wrapped ourselves, and had them for breakfast. They tasted delicious, even though they looked shameful compared to my father’s perfectly square cakes.

The last night of the year

My father knew a lot about bánh chưng because he is the eldest son of my grandparents. He also knows a lot about the rituals of worshiping ancestors because Vietnamese ancestors are believed to "follow" the eldest son from north to south. On the last day of the old year, my father carefully cleaned the family altar and arranged a special display, which included an incense bowl, a pair of bánh chưng, fresh flowers, a bottle of homemade rice liquor, and fruits of many colors. My mother and I cooked special Tết dishes, such as boiled chicken, glass noodle soup, steamed fish, stewed pork and eggs, fried vegetables, and orange gấc sticky rice.

We offered our food to our ancestors around 5pm on the family altar, and after allowing our ancestors to "eat" this sumptuous meal for several hours, we gathered and enjoyed the best food of the year. The cutting of my father’s bánh chưng was a ceremony by itself; after untying the bamboo strings and peeling away the outer leaves, we arranged the strings across the cake’s green surface. Turning the cake upside down, we held the two ends of each string, pulling them towards each other, thus cutting the bánh chưng into square or triangle pieces. The taste of my father’s bánh chưng still remains in my mouth today; fragrant and savory. It tasted perfect, together with the pickled onions and scallions which my mother and I had prepared.

After cleaning up, I would clutch my mother’s hand as we walked to a nearby pagoda. Holding burning incense in front of my chest, my eyes closed, I would pray to Buddha to bless me with lots of lucky money that year. As I was never given any pocket money during the rest of the year, Tết was my only chance to gather savings, which I kept in a clay pig on my bookshelf. If I had enough lucky money, I would be able to buy a new book.

Returning home from the pagoda, I would see that my brothers had hung our firecrackers on our front door, anxiously waiting for the time to set them on fire. I wish I had joined them then, because firecrackers would be banned a few years later, hence the disappearance of this long and special tradition. But at that time, I helped my mother as she hurried to set up a tray of offerings, laden with fruit, flowers, liquor and incense. I carried the tray with her to our front yard and lit the incense. Watching how long my mother prayed to heaven, I sensed how important this ceremony was to her and to our family. I felt that all the gods were coming to join us, and my ancestors were also present.

Chúc mừng năm mới

Finally, the New Year approached with the faint sounds of firecrackers from far away, then moving closer and louder towards us. My two brothers would fight for the right to ignite the firecrackers, while I stood, frozen in fear, my hands over my ears.

We woke up very early the next morning, with yellow mai flowers brightening our living room. Smoldering incense filled my senses, and my happiness soared. Firecracker remnants rested like a blanket of pink and red on our front yard. We were not allowed to sweep anything away during the entire first day of the New Year, so as not to chase our luck away. I admired this red and pink carpet all day as it was twirled up by a dancing wind or rested peacefully under the gold, yellow and white chrysanthemum and mai flowers.

I put on my new set of clothes for Tết that I had wanted all year long, while my brothers burned left-over firecrackers in our front yard. When my parents were ready, they called us into the house, handing each of us a red envelope containing our lucky money. We would bow our heads, wishing them health, luck, success and happiness, before busting out of the house, waving the red envelopes on our hands.

But we were not allowed to go into any neighbor’s home unless we were specially invited. One's luck for the whole year depended on the fortune and character of the first person to enter one's home on the first day of the New Year. My father often chose a senior neighbor whose children were successful and who had a gentle and cheerful personality. The neighbor would often come before 7am on the first day of Tết, bringing my parents lots of good wishes and a red envelope for me, since I was the youngest member of the family.

During Tết, families in Saigon gather at flower markets to pose for photos, buy new plants for their home, or just simply to soak in the festive ambiance.

Around noon our house would be filled with greetings from relatives and neighbors. Everyone visited the house of everyone else in the neighborhood. We served our visitors green tea and candied coconut ribbons. Our family members took turns visiting the houses of relatives and friends, making sure that someone was always home to greet and take care of unexpected visitors. Snacks and food were served around the clock.

All the food my mother and I had spent many hours preparing came in handy; even though we were discouraged by traditions from cooking during the first day of the New Year, we could always serve our guests a good meal with our bánh chưng, stewed pork in coconut, as well as pickled onions and scallions. When the cooking resumed on the second or third day of Tết, we would make sweet and sour soup with our fresh fish, and serve our guests the ripest vegetables from our garden. From our home flowed an endless river of chatter and laughter, while I would occasionally sneak into my parents’ bedroom to count how much lucky money I had received.

Thinking back, I realize that my parents were very strict in raising me and hardly ever showed their emotions during our daily lives. It was only during Tết that I saw their tender sides. Tết also allowed me to be a bit naughty and not be scolded or punished, and it allowed me the rare privilege of accompanying my parents whenever they visited their friends.

Many Tếts have gone by, though my memories from one particular Tết remain vivid. My mother had taken me to visit one of her good friends who lived on the other side of the rice fields from us. I remember the vast rice fields spreading their green arms out towards the horizon as we walked. The sun was setting, tilting light onto my mother’s long, black hair. Flocks of white cranes rose up, dotting the blue sky with their flapping wings. We walked among the singing of rice plants and the perfume of a spring that embraced us from all directions. I wished then that I could go on like that forever and ever beside my mother.

These days most Vietnamese families, including my own, no longer celebrate Tết the traditional ways due to all the demands of modern life. Still, regardless of how busy we are, we set aside time to enjoy Tết with our loved ones. Families are united for Tết, and friends who may not see each other for the rest of the year will meet and enjoy a meal together. Perhaps Tết is important for all Vietnamese because it reminds us of how happiness can derive from our cultural heritage, and how wonderful it is to stop running after our material desires, at least for a few days, and enjoy what we already have.

This article was originally published in 2020.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child. She has received many literary awards in Việt Nam and internationally, including the Lannan Literary Awards Fellowship for a work of exceptional quality and for its contribution to peace and reconciliation. A version of this article was originally published in Vietnam Heritage.

A Damaged Masterpiece Reveals How Much We Take Our Cultural Heritage for Granted

2026-02-12T11:00:00+07:00

A once-damaged national treasure remains on view as if nothing had happened, while other works are displayed with little context — what does this tell us about how art museums preserve Vietnam's cultural heritage and shape our art history narratives today?

A few weeks before the Tết holiday, the Hồ Chí Minh City Fine Arts Museum feels much more lively than usual, as it does every year. From the entrance and spiral staircases of the almost 100-year-old heritage building, young local visitors pose in áo dài for new year photoshoots, while foreign visitors pose in nearly every corner. Only a few pause to look closely at the artworks scattered across different rooms of the main building, which house a collection of modern artworks by mostly southern artists before and after 1975.

Washing a lacquer masterpiece with dish soap

Passing the central hall with sculpture on the second floor, visitors turn left into a dim corridor that leads to one of the museum’s national treasures: the renowned 1989 lacquer masterpiece ‘Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc’ (Central, Southern and Northern Spring Gardens) attached on a wall in its own separate air-conditioned room dedicated to maestro painter Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908–1993).

Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908–1993). Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc (Central, Southern and Northern Spring Gardens), 1989. Lacquer on board. 200 x 540 cm. Collection of Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Opposite to the masterpiece, the late painter’s tools and materials are displayed behind glass, alongside some pencil and watercolor sketches. Yet, no context is provided to explain the significance of the materials and techniques of this masterpiece. In the painting itself, twenty women dressed in their own traditional outfits and áo dài across the country’s three regions gather to celebrate the spring festival at a temple, surrounded by nature and a lively atmosphere of peaceful time. Signature red lacquer dominates the composition; eggshell inlay and gilded gold are integral to the whole painting’s surface. Nguyễn Gia Trí spent nearly 20 years completing the work with the assistance of his students: from 1969 when the country was still in the midst of war, to 1989, during the country’s transition through the Đổi Mới (Reformation) period.

Nguyễn Gia Trí’s personal items and painting tools at Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

The first impression from most visitors entering the room was amazement. Someone paused and asked: “Nguyễn Gia Trí… you mean, the old D2 street?” before proceeding to pose for photos from different angles. Other visitors, especially foreigners, walked back and forth in front of the work, squinting at the wall text, only to find a few lines of artwork description and the artist’s biography. Despite initial admiration, some began to express slight confusion while sensing that something was off about the national treasure. In certain areas, layers of black lacquer appeared worn, the gilded gold darkened or worn out, and the eggshell inlay looked fragmented, disrupting the fluidity of the details. Importantly, despite the dominant lively red tones, some colors in the details had undeniably faded.

“This painting must have been damaged once before. Look at this layer of paint over there. It’s already worn out, and the colors are so dark and pale now,” a Vietnamese visitor said to his group of friends after carefully viewing the artwork. The masterpiece remains on the wall, celebrating spring as prayer for the country to endure war and move towards reunification. Yet, a sense of quiet conflicted feeling emerges. Something feels off, and no one seems to know, or remember, the damage that had changed the work permanently.

Details of Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc (Central, Southern and Northern Spring Gardens) at Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

‘Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc’ made major news headlines in early 2019, after it was found to have suffered major damage after being taken off for cleaning in December 2018. It was later revealed that the damage had been treated with sandpaper, bột chu (a polishing powder) and even… dish soap — perhaps the last material that one would expect in artwork conservation. The incident sparked outrage among the art community and authorities, with many online articles calling out the carelessness and lack of accountability, and an urgent demand for the national treasure to be repaired with special care.

According to painter Nguyễn Xuân Việt, one of Nguyễn Gia Trí’s few students who understands the master painter’s techniques well, the reinforcement work could only restore about 80% of the painting. The damage done to the materials on the surface, however, cannot fully be reversed. In other words, while the painting survives materially, the original spirit has been lost. Nearly seven years later, now in 2026, the partially repaired work has returned to public view, as if nothing had happened. Visitors are left with no choice but to accept this reality of an artwork that has once been damaged, with little acknowledgement of what was lost, with minimal context beyond the familiar narratives of national pride and historical symbolism.

Visitors pose with artworks.

Beyond one damaged painting

Leaving the room for the artwork and heading back through the corridor, one would notice the contrast is quite intriguing: while 20 female figures celebrate spring within the ‘Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc’ masterpiece, young visitors rush to take their pre-Tết photoshoot with camera equipment, tripods, and even reflector boards filling the balconies and spiral staircases. Some film TikTok videos along the balconies, some even fall asleep on the benches, while foreign visitors navigate through the crowd, trying to understand the paintings with little context.

Perhaps, the national treasure lost its soul due to the damage caused by a lack of accountability, just as the museum’s function also seems to be fading. Much of the collection has become a secondary background to most visitors, shaped by an incohesive narrative and absence of context that discourages deeper engagements, or even minimal attention, towards the artworks and their historical significance. While it is rather unfortunate that most guests only connect with the venue on a surface level, one could attribute this visitor behavior both to individual apathy towards the arts and the current conditions of a national-level institution, where conservation has been treated lightly, and artworks are bound to a one-sided narrative without sufficient explanation.

The museum interior and Tết photoshoots.

This raised further questions about the state of other artworks in the museum: limited government funding for acquisition, conservation and daily operations; the high temperatures and humidity of Vietnam's climate; and architectural and spatial challenges. This does not take into account the fact that the plot where the museum sits is at risk of sinking due to the construction of a high-rise next door.

At this moment, the concern is no longer solely about why and how an artwork was damaged. It projects a bigger picture about the current state of cultural heritage preservation in Vietnam, as well as the key players' struggle to foster awareness and create meaningful narratives that accurately represent Vietnam’s art history and cultural heritage in Saigon, as it’s difficult to move beyond the nostalgic “time capsule” of the turbulent past amidst changing times. This feels especially urgent in the age of cultural tourism and social media, when the demand for art consumption among the younger generations is increasing, alongside the growing number of tourists visiting the country.

The looming construction project next door once caused the collapse of the museum's northern gate due to subsidence.

A state-owned art museum serves the role of researching, preserving, and presenting artworks that reflect a nation’s cultural heritage and collective memory, reflecting the development of techniques, aesthetics, and art education — more than just holding what remains and survives from the past. In post-colonial and independent Vietnam, museums have played a central role in nation-building narrative, through a constructed national (art) history that features revolutionary artists. Still, the decisions that shape these narratives are not within the public’s control, but with institutions and authorities. What remains in our control, however, is how we acknowledge and respond to the limitations in how our culture and history art is treated and presented, how we engage critically with art history, and continue shaping our own narratives in the present and future, beyond the museum walls and across different platforms.

Supporting our local art museum does not simply mean purchasing a one-day ticket to briefly view the works, then move on with photo ops. It also means showing up with awareness: asking why our institutions and art ecosystem still remain underdeveloped, whether we are truly comfortable with how the narratives are framed, and how we appreciate our history and the masterpieces left behind by those before us. The costly lesson of a damaged national treasure, perhaps one among others yet unnoticed, reveals structural issues that remain unresolved. Still, the growing interest in traditions, art, and culture suggests that there is still hope for public engagement and discourse.

Hidden within the wall text in front of ‘Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc,’ a line from Nguyễn Gia Trí in 1979 reads: “Sáng tác ví như một bát nước, ta đổ tràn đầy, rồi những gì còn lại, ta giữ và phát triển / Painting and creating can be compared with the brim-full bowl of water, one retains all that remains and develops it.”

What remains after the damage and partial restoration is not the physical artwork itself, but the responsibility of those involved, and how we remember, question, and preserve what is left.

Recognized as a national treasure in 2013, ‘Vườn Xuân Trung Nam Bắc’ is now on view in the permanent collection of Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum. More information about the masterpiece and museum admission can be found on this website.

In 'Đêm Giao Thừa' EP, a Đàn Tranh Artist Offers Novel Twists on Nostalgic Tết Sounds

2026-02-10T11:00:00+07:00

Indie đàn tranh artist Brian Bùi has just released Đêm Giao Thừa, an EP containing energetic covers of three classic Tết songs and an original track that pays homage to styles from the 1960s and 1970s.

Layering elements of bolero, psychedelic cumbia, samba rock, and cha-cha-chá, the 13-minute extended play blends nostalgic sounds and rhythms with fresh perspective to create a new feeling for the season. “While the EP draws from the past, I also experimented with guitar effects on the đàn tranh and introduced South American genres that hadn’t yet been popularized in Vietnam during that era. Đêm Giao Thừa celebrates the start of a new year, as well as a new direction for my music that represents who I am in this moment,” he explained on the project's page.

Video via Brian Bùi's YouTube.

Brian switched from the violin to the đàn tranh as part of his exploration of traditional music, a way to connect with his cultural heritage. He studied the đàn tranh with Vân-Ánh “Vanessa” Võ while pursuing a degree in music composition at the University of the Pacific and later with NSƯT Nguyễn Thị Hải Phượng as part of the Master of Arts degree he is currently pursuing at Berklee Online.

Photo by Chiron Dương.

Đêm Giao Thừa is is currently available on all major streaming apps, and he is touring in support of it in the United States through March.

Unraveling the Mystery Behind the 'Mùi Việt Kiều' of My Childhood

2026-02-08T14:00:00+07:00

My favorite candy used to be Hershey’s Kisses. Wrapped in colorful, sparkling foil, these little nubs of decadence made me feel special as a child, not just because of their sugary sweetness, but also because, for much of Vietnam’s contemporary history, you could only enjoy them if you have relatives abroad.

The last war that plagued Vietnam severely fragmented the country in more ways than one, broke up families and eventually resulted in Vietnamese becoming one of the largest diasporic communities in many western societies, known as Việt Kiều in the Vietnamese language. As a kid, I couldn’t fully grasp the complexities behind the term, I just knew that my aunt was one, and she often gave me Hershey’s Kisses when she came to stay with us, so her visits were always a highly anticipated occasion of my formative years.

The first evening on the day she landed, after a family meal, we would gather around the big suitcase as she gave out carefully labelled bags of presents for each person. Over the years, her visits have blurred into one amorphous blob in my memory, so I struggle to remember what I received. I remember the diverse range of Kisses colors, but mostly what remains ingrained in my mind is the fragrance of her luggage — it is a distinctive yet malleable aroma, or even amalgam of aromas that’s hard to put into words, a mystifying mùi Việt Kiều.

Hershey's Kisses once felt like an exclusive treat for Vietnamese kids with relatives abroad. Photo via Tasting Table.

Mùi Việt Kiều, in my memory, was neither a perfume nor from any recognizable artificial smell genres like floral, herb, or fruit. It wasn’t detergent- or food-forward, it just was. As an adult, I’ve forgotten about it, until a few weeks ago, a curious TikTok video popped up on my feed, advertising a bottle of laundry essential oil with “authentic hương Việt Kiều.” It was astonishing because, for the longest time, I’ve always assumed I was alone in noticing its existence, but someone out there has not only identified it but also commercialized it?

I’ve shared my observations with friends and colleagues, and while everybody confirmed they too have sensed mùi Việt Kiều, no one can pinpoint what it is exactly, apart from vague claims like “I’ll know it when I smell it.” The comment section beneath the laundry oil video was much more illuminating and helpful; someone claims it’s the smell of Irish Spring soaps, while others are sure that it comes from Bounce dryer sheets and Aquafresh toothpaste. Energized by possibilities, I made the next best decision: obtain every suggested item in the theories and did smell tests.

The dubious fragrance as advertised on Shopee.

This is the point where I have to admit that there’s no closure at the end of this journey. None of them smells as good as my aunt’s luggage, even though at various points over the years, it too was filled with Irish Spring and Aquafresh. It is entirely possible that they have recently changed their scenting formulae or that my childhood memories have gotten too murky, but perhaps, the most likely scenario is that there’s no definitive mùi Việt Kiều. Each luggage during each visit smelled ever slightly different depending on what it encompassed: a little bit of Hershey, a whiff of Ocean Spray dry cranberries, a touch of Kirkland multivitamins, etc — all piecing together a little smellscape of America that appeared so exotic and quasi-mythological to little me.

Today, globalization, cultural exchange and advancements in logistics have all but dismantled the myth of American products in Vietnam. How I could very easily procure all the scented items for my smell tests from local shops and online platforms is a testament to this shifting dynamic. Hershey is now readily available, but Vietnam’s progress has also given rise to a plethora of local chocolates so excellent I haven’t touched Kisses since. When we didn’t have much, every little thing was so special and treasured.

The most memorable (and tasty) source of mùi Việt Nam. Photo by Hoàng Vũ via Thanh Niên.

Back in the day, as my aunt’s visits inched to a close, her empty suitcase would gradually fill up again — this time chock-full of distinctively Vietnam items to stock up her pantry and to be given out as gifts on the other shore: dried shrimps, coffee beans, lacquer combs, silk áo dài, Thái Nguyên tea, lotus hearts, and a sizable and eclectic collection of various mắm. Sometimes I wonder about that moment, when, after flying halfway across the globe, she would arrive at home and unzip that suitcase. Does it give out a distinctive smell, too? A mystifying mùi Việt Nam that’s hard to put into words.

When Lịch Bloc Is Gone, What Will Vietnam Use to Keep Discarded Fish Bones?

2026-02-02T11:00:00+07:00

I have never bought a lịch bloc, or tear-off calendar, for personal use, because every new year, I'm bound to be gifted a brand-new one. In Vietnam, a calendar is often something one purchases as a present for others.

The tear-off calendar has been a typical item in local households for centuries. There were even records of Nguyễn-Dynasty authorities overseeing the production of new calendars to give out during Tết. The act of ripping off a page from the calendar block is so historically relevant that it even gives rise to the crude slang phrase “bóc lịch,” loosely translated as “calendar ripping,” referring to jail time.

Brightly colored calendars sold alongside Tết decorations at a store in District 5.

In recent years, it's reported that all calendar sales have been on the decline because new calendar designs are repetitive and boring; people routinely receive them as free promotional gifts; and since the time and date are readily available on smartphones, tear-off calendars have become somewhat obsolete. The iconic Tết staple is no exception to this drop in popularity.

When it comes to Tết gifts, many prefer to receive aesthetically pleasing items like gift baskets, which can be displayed at home, making rooms feel fresh and new. Calendars, in contrast, simply offer mundane images few remember to tear off.

Lịch bloc comes in many sizes for every home.

But I feel that we might take calendars for granted because beyond their stated function of time-keeping, they affect our lives in subtle ways. My mother often uses the pages to write checklists for her morning market trips. My family occasionally uses them for food wrapping or as just a placemat to discard fish bones during family meals.

This page will often end up on the dining table as a fishbone holder, or in the trash after a doodle session is finished.

My most vivid memory with calendars, however, dates back to when I was five. I loved drawing and couldn’t fight the urge to scribble everywhere, especially on the wall. My parents had to put a stop to it before I ruined the house. So they gave me spare calendar pages to doodle on and thus tearing a new page off the bloc became an exciting routine.

Lịch bloc may eventually lose its main function, but their spare papers and their offering of marginal conveniences will remain a part of our lives. Even though they may not be as significant as other Tết gifts, they have one advantage over fancy, expensive presents: when Tết is over, decorations are taken down, snacks from gift baskets are all eaten, and we all go back to our normal lives, but there will always be a calendar on your wall for another 300-some days, with all of its Tết visuals, maintaining a touch of festive energy remains in your house throughout the rest of the year.

The Vibrancy of Vietnam's Mundane Depicted by Illustrator Chan-Nhu Le

2026-02-01T16:00:00+07:00

“I miss that. When I was young, on the motorbike with my friends, it was like ’hey, you have 15 minutes?’ and we just met up [...], had some street food and did literally nothing; just street watching. It was fun,” Chan-Nhu Le shared with Saigoneer about the inspiration for her illustrations.

Saigoneer was first drawn to Chan-Nhu Le’s work because of its playful depiction of daily life in Vietnam, but she spoke to us from California, where she emigrated at age 23. The artwork allows her to return to happy moments and memories here, where she was born and raised, as well as share the country’s culture abroad. Meanwhile, the term she used, “fun,” to describe her teenage experiences could certainly apply to her style as a whole, thanks to its employment of vibrant colors, jovial scenes, and lighthearted commotion.

Born and raised in Huế, Chan-Nhu Le has connections with numerous regions in the country: her father is in Hanoi, while she worked for a time in Saigon. Such familiarity with different cities allows her to blend and borrow elements from regional cultures into composites that aim to speak to Vietnam as a whole, particularly when seen by those outside of the nation. Her illustration for Tết, for example, features Bia Saigon, Hanoi and Huda as well as southern fruits and northern flowers.

Chan-Nhu has taken a circuitous route to art, having started a career in social work upon graduation. Motivated by a desire to get to know people and help them, she was quickly disenchanted by bureaucracy and the constant stresses related to securing funding. Recognizing an opportunity, she enrolled in art school in the US, beginning on a photography track. In one of her classes, however, she saw the work of Hong Kong illustrator Victo Ngai. “What kind of art is it?” she remembers wondering. ”It's exactly what I wanted to do, and I switched majors the next day.”

Studying art formally allowed Chan-Nhu Le to focus on her aims and stylistic preferences. “I know exactly what I want to do with illustration, but when I switched to illustration… I didn't have the skill set to kind of make it happen.” Through study, practice, and by evaluating her past works, she is now better able to create work she describes as “straightforward” and “able to tell a story.”

Citing Julia Rothman, a New York Times illustrator with an expansive portfolio that includes editorial work for the New Yorker and Washington Post, Chan-Nhu aspires to work with a story or conceptual message. And while her illustrations often appear as if they were based on a specific photograph, she says that even though she may use numerous photographs as sources for a composite, the scenes inherently involve memory and imagination. For example, her wedding illustration has many elements Saigoneer readers will recognize: a group of wobbly dancers with drinks and a microphone, a child looking up at a crowd of adults, a couple pouring onto a pyramid of glasses, etc. And yet, if you look closely and recognize how many people are singing at once, you'll realize it's a work of fantasy.

Her large works rely on specific, precise details to contribute to larger moods and feelings, while her works of singular figures or objects invite recognition of the familiar. Many of them also come from memories, such as the sight of a policeman on the back of a Grab Bike, or a fish vendor who had chastised Chan-Nhu for not wearing enough clothing in the harsh sunlight. “Chopping fish and getting mad at me for not wearing enough protection for my skin is hilarious and just so random, but that is so Vietnam — chaotic and so random.”

Since attaining her art degree, Chan-Nhu Le has explored different means of utilizing her skills while meeting the real-world needs of rent and food. To get a sense of what it would be like to work as a full-time illustrator in Vietnam, in 2017, she moved to Saigon and took a position at a publication producing timely cartoons in response to soft news stories. While a good experience, she admitted that it wasn’t a good fit, and she didn’t care enough about the content she was tasked with creating.

While in Saigon, she offered free drawing classes at Vin-Space Art Studio, which encouraged her to pursue a career in education upon returning to the US. Following the cumbersome licensing process to become a public school art teacher in California, she is now in her fourth year at a middle school, where she is tasked with introducing children to a wide array of art styles, mediums, histories, and ideas. While enjoying the job, she noted how physically and emotionally draining it can be. The job leaves her less time and energy to pursue her own artwork.

While in Vietnam, Chan-Nhu Le connected with like-minded Vietnamese creatives, including the folks behind Collective Memory and OH QUAO, which are amongst the shops that sell her work here. Other connections simply contribute to her digital network of support and encouragement that spans borders and languages. She makes regular return visits to Vietnam to visit family, and the trips provide more inspiration for her future projects. Meanwhile, she dreams of having editorial work in a prestigious publication like the New York Times, or gracing a Uniqlo shirt. And in the meantime, her artwork promises to delight those who see it online or in a shop and experience the comforts of recognition and appreciation for the precious moments of doing “literally nothing.”

The Unquenchable Spirit of Artist Lê Triều Điển

2026-01-29T10:00:00+07:00

“Điển is like a flower; there is no question of growing or not growing.”

It’s the same with Lê Triều Điển and creating art, according to his fellow painter and friend of many years, Tri Ròm.

“My paintings are like scar tissue,” Điển says when pressed for the best feedback he’s ever received about his paintings. “You might look at them and see rubbish, but they heal pain,” he adds before likening them to the lotus flowers that emerge from the muck in his delta homeland.

A flower emerging from mud is an apt metaphor for Điển’s life and career as a whole. He was born in the Mekong Delta in 1944, and the past eight decades have involved the poverty, sacrifice, war and trauma that are sadly common to his generation, as detailed in his powerful autobiography The Journey of Alluvium. Yet, like a lotus refusing to wilt during a drought and blooming spectacularly when the rains return, Điển has triumphed to become an important, successful artist.

Luxury cars were filling with people who had just finished lavish breakfasts behind myself, Tri, Điển, and his daughter-in-law at the restaurant of the homestay in Can Tho we’d stayed at the night before. The street leading in along the Hau River was lined with imposing new mansions looming behind gaudy gates and I commented to Điển about how different the area must look from when he was stationed in Can Tho during the American War, when the river was “patrolled up and down by warships and patrol boats day and night” and the surrounding area was full of “coconut orchards with topless tree trunks, paddy fields devastated by clearing chemicals.”

Yes, he said, the area was very different from when locals here went out in the middle of the night to catch mice and snakes and frogs to sell at the “ghost markets;” but “go into one of those houses and look at their walls, they have no real art.” This is as damning a description as Điển can levy, because to him art, in addition to family and community, is the most important part of life.

Điển is refreshingly unimpressed with money, sometimes to the frustration of people attempting to sell his paintings. His friends casually mention the great numbers of paintings that were sent overseas for various sales or collections that he never saw again or received payment for, and there is even discussion of a zoo in Denmark that plagiarized his plans for a giant panda enclosure.

At one point during our weekend together, a gallery owner who was with us brought up plans for an exhibition in Hanoi to sell his paintings. Điển simply lit a cigarette, threw up his hands and walked away while telling the man to talk to the woman who manages those matters for him. Asked point-blank what he thinks of the business side of art, he says one needs to understand it but ultimately, “as an artist, you make art, you do your best. Everything else? Leave it to other people.”

“Emotions as Transparent as Water from its Source”

The one constant throughout Điển’s life has been creation. At the age of 12, he moved to Saigon for a formal art education. While he didn’t enjoy the rigid coursework and sterile approach to painting, living in the city introduced him to a variety of other artists, writers and creatives whose philosophies and lifestyles proved fundamental for how he would approach the world and his place in it.

Điển was able to avoid frontline conflict during the war by producing technical drawings and later studying aviation mechanics. During the war, he drifted between Da Nang, Can Tho, Vinh Long and Saigon, surrounding himself with a great variety of passionate individuals to discuss literature, poetry, music, and painting while producing literary journals and hosting small art exhibitions at cafes and bars. He lived, he says, as a bụi đời (dust of life), a vagabond. With little more than a chair that could unfold into a comfortable enough bed, he moved from here to there on a whim with frequent trips to visit his family.

During those years, painting was a sort of therapy for him. “I felt that I was painting for myself, for my own soul that was suffering the pain of my war-torn country. I painted my dreams and hopes of a peaceful future, and I painted children’s pleasure and laughter on a happy field. I painted temples in ruin but young buds rising from burnt tree stumps could be seen.”

Yet he did not paint according to the styles he had been taught in school, nor did he follow any specific trends. Rather, he followed his instinct and spontaneous inspiration, never arriving at a blank canvas with a plan or idea, simply letting the lines and colors flow as they must. “I gradually eliminated all the craftsmanship, got rid of technical performance and returned to the nature of my innocence like a child drawing as simply as those ancient people leaving their paintings on cave walls, with emotions as transparent as water from its source flowing over gravel and stones to reach the plains,” he says.

He continues with this approach today. His often very large paintings have a raw boldness typified by strong lines and arrows that seem to rush across the canvas like waters surging across a floodplain. Given his biography, one can imagine scenes of delta floodplains, rice fields and humble countryside homes. There are also elements of sign language, Khmer and Oc Eo cultures and Theravada Buddhism. Điển can be evasive regarding what an actual painting is of, preferring viewers to take from the scenes what they will. This tendency to not explain every element of his work does not suggest a lack of artistic clarity, however.

While many of his paintings tend to be abstract and expressionist and contain elements of cubism, there are moments of literal specificity. His home is filled with his paintings and drawings: something hangs on nearly every inch of open wall and stacks of papers and canvases sit on nearly every available surface. During a recent visit to his home, he flipped through several dozen drawings and occasionally paused to point something out: a buffalo, a horse, a boat, a xích lô, his wife when she is writing a poem, his wife when she is angry at him, a self-portrait. He doesn’t offer why he painted those things, nor do I think to ask. It would be like asking a cloud why it was dropping rain. Yet he is quick to note where he finds inspiration: everywhere. His natural surroundings, cave paintings, architecture, and most importantly, his family and friends.

You have to know the rules before you break them is a common adage in art, often used in reference to how Picasso learned to paint in the traditional style of his day before moving on to the ground-breaking works he became famous for. Thus I asked Điển if he thought his conventional art education was necessary to make way for his abstract style. He shakes his head no, and says he is self-taught, before offering up this story:

An ancient Chinese king recognized the technical mastery of Chinese and Korean painters but considered Vietnamese to be less talented. He nevertheless invited them to partake in a contest wherein the winner would be the one that could depict the best dragon. The other painters worked meticulously on extravagant dragons with fine details. A Vietnamese contestant, Trang Quynh, didn’t have any formal education in art and simply dipped all ten fingers in the ink and wiggled them down across the canvas. The king shook his head at the ten zig-zagging streaks of ink and said dragons do not look like that. Quynh countered that in his homeland, dragons do in fact look like that. And unless a dragon were to appear before them now, no one could tell him otherwise.

This confidence in his own artistic vision, playful wit and connection to depicting his homeland resonates through his hundreds of works.

“I don’t have a teaching method, I have a living method,” he says when asked what he says to younger artists that seek him. Truly, he may not offer specific theories on balancing colors or controlling white space, but one watching him surely receives a lesson in how to live as an artist. To that point, I should have known better to ask him how he prefers to work: in silence or with music? In the morning or at night? At home or a studio? After a few glasses of wine or sober? The answer was simply “Yes.”

This adaptive nature applies to the mediums he uses. In addition to the conventional canvas and inks, paper with watercolor or pen, and ceramics, Điển can create art out of just about anything. For example, when he once took great delight in flipping over one painting on his wall to reveal it was in fact the cardboard lid of a bánh trung thu box. Similarly, painted chair cushions dangle from his staircase railings and x-ray paper covered in images dangles from the ceiling.

Witnessing Điển work provides further insight into his philosophy. When Saigoneer visited to take photographs for this story, we were greeted with fresh fruit, snacks and beer. Before any discussion of photographs we hoped to take, he thanked us for visiting and said he wanted us each to go home with one of his paintings. When we asked if we could take a short video of him at work, he noted that because it was my birthday he would draw a portrait of me. With concentrated ease he filled the paper with divisive lines, pausing momentarily to ponder the space before grabbing a new color; the piece came together like the effortless blooming of a complex flower.

Work Before Play

Creating art can be a lonely, tireless task especially if one dabbles in genres that are not embraced by mainstream artists, but being an artist is not. I got a first-hand glimpse of the importance Điển places on community during the first lunch we shared. At the end of the meal, he lifted his beer glass and turned slowly to everyone at the table and one by one: “You: I want to see your next painting. You: I want to read your next poem. You: show me the next painting you make. And you: I cannot wait to have another meal together again.”

Điển’s genuine and motivating words that day came as no surprise based on the way he described his life and journey. Beginning with the many teachers he studied with and the peers he surrounded himself with, his book is filled with references to painters, sculptors, singers, and writers with whom he sat in cramped cafes and bars, sharing ideas and exchanging work. He details countless literary journals that rose and fell and exhibitions for soon-to-be-defunct groups and organizations. They are not attempts at name-dropping, but rather reflective of the way he sees community as an integral part of creativity and the galvanizing effect it can have on a person’s life.

Considering this past, I was unsurprised to learn that our main activity on the day we arrived in Vinh Long would be to meet with his group of friends at one of their terracotta kilns. We gathered in the spacious living room which was filled with paintings, sculptures and ceramics. The owner pointed at the paintings explaining who had painted each: a friend, a child, himself. New books were exchanged as we sat drinking coffee, eating snacks. I naively asked Điển if this was what it was like back in the day when he spent time with the same group of friends. He laughed and said, “No, all we did then was work, work, work.”

Indeed, while Điển may have achieved a level of financial comfort now, leaner decades were filled with a great variety of arduous tasks to make ends meet. While subsisting on little more than boiled potatoes and sorghum supplemented with boiled pig bones, Điển earned a paycheck painting vehicle license plates and state propaganda posters, weeding paddy fields, harvesting water spinach, selling simple cakes, and delivering newspapers. And of course, in the spacious factory beside the house we were sitting in, he crafted terra cotta statues.

The lifting of the embargo with America and the generally improved economy has reverberated across society as exemplified by the terracotta factory. Before its owner settled into semi-retirement and tapered down production, he employed upwards of 1,000 people. Điển, too, has enjoyed more financial comfort in recent years. After decades of group and solo exhibitions, since 2005 he has enjoyed an amount of commercial success. His work has been featured in the prestigious Galerie Dumonteil in Paris, attracted the attention of renowned international art collectors, and been in numerous shows and galleries here in Vietnam.

“Fifty Years in Prison”

There once was a struggling painter who began coming home to find his clothes and house cleaned and food prepared. This went on for quite some time and he never could figure out who was doing it. But one day he noticed a female figure in one of his paintings and became suspicious. He hid and waited after pretending to leave for the day. When he burst back into his house, he surprised the woman who had indeed emerged from the painting. He caught her and the two married. His life improved instantly and he was not only happy but also began to experience great fame and financial success. Unfortunately, this led to him drinking too much and losing his passion for art. Unable to rescue him from his alcoholism or re-ignite his love of painting his wife left him.

Điển originally offered this story, an altered version of a story by Đoàn Thị Điểm, to warn of the risks of fame and success. Adding, that while he is financially comfortable now, he is far too old to fall into any of the dangers that accompany them. Besides, is he famous? If you ask him, he doesn’t know nor care.

But then I pressed him if the characters in the story shared any similarities with him and his wife, Hồng Lĩnh. Sure, he agreed, her presence in his life has been instrumental. While it’s true that she manages many domestic tasks and shouldered a great deal of work during the poor years, working in a library as well as taking on odd jobs to help ensure he had resources needed to paint, that undersells her role in his life. He may jokingly say that they have been sentenced to each other for half a century, but he is utterly sincere when advising “When you get married, you must treat your wife like a goddess.”

Lĩnh is a gifted poet, sculpture, and painter herself and learned of Điển via his artwork more than 50 years ago. Seeing his work before she’d ever met, she explained to me, was what first won her over. At their wedding, a friend joked: “This couple might have their future in poverty. One artist usually leads his life in misery, they both are artists, so their misery maybe double.”

That prediction, thankfully never came to pass. Rather, the financial struggles they shared may have brought them closer together as people and as artists. When their eldest son was admitted to Saigon, they moved to the city and worked side-by-side to create paintings and sculptures with the hope they could sell them to restaurants and hotels. Their work continues to stand side by side, though now it is in galleries and exhibitions. And of course, lining the walls of their home.

One is not likely to get their work confused, however. While Điển prefers thick, angular lines, she opts for more curves and gentle restraint, though the most exemplifying difference is her frequent use of Vietnamese, English and French texts by herself and others, layered on top of the work. Lĩnh may be a quieter presence in rooms punctuated by Điển’s staccato chuckle, but her art and life is just as deserving of an article. Hopefully, that happens in the future, but in the meantime, no story about Điển could possibly be told without her inclusion.

Equally important as their work hung on the walls in their home is what is scribbled around it. Between paintings and photographs are the squiggled doodles of one of their grandchildren. By contrast, they help articulate how Điển’s seemingly simple strokes are the result of artistic rigor and practice combined with youthful exuberance. But more importantly, they serve as a metaphor for how his work is intrinsically tied to his family and the inspiration it provides, his belief that any surface can be a canvas, and that artistic impulses should never be ignored, but rather praised and promoted.

This article was originally published in 2021.

Cổ Động's Live Session Series 'Động Tag' Returns for Season 2 With 9 Vietnamese Artists

2026-01-27T10:00:00+07:00

Động Tag Live Session, Cổ Động’s series of live recordings aiming to highlight Vietnam’s up-and-coming musicians, is returning with a second season.

Động Tag first premiered back in 2023 with 11 episodes, each featuring one artist or group at a different location. Some of the more whimsical impromptu stages include Giấy Gấp performing on the bank of the Saigon River with the Ba Son Bridge hulking in the background, or Vũ Thanh Vân singing her heart out inside an ornamental fish shop.

A recap of Động Tag Season 1.

According to Cổ Động, the live session series was established to give lesser-known and new local musical acts to reach a bigger audience through their own musicianship. With high production value and recording quality, these live sessions will appeal to both listeners and artists, who can enjoy the music in a stripped-down, intimate way.

Season 2's featured line-up.

Season 2 of Động Tag has returned since last December, this time bringing along nine musicians back to the same stage — including familiar names like Nhạc Của Trang, Datmaniac, and Minh Đinh.

The season was co-produced by Cổ Động, BLAZE, PhimGoods, 326 Concepts, and Kontribute over four days. Have a taste of Động Tag Season 2 in a few snippets below:

EP01: Nhạc Của Trang

EP06: Chillies

Media courtesy of Cổ Động.

The Artist Preserving Saigon's Cultural Tapestry Through Hand-Painted Signs

2026-01-24T10:00:00+07:00

"In the early 2000s, the market experienced an exodus of painters due to the shift to digital; it was difficult to retain customers otherwise. I didn't want my craft to be forgotten, so I started everything all over,” Nguyễn Hoài Bảo told me in Vietnamese when I visited his studio.

Bảo, born in 1986, is one of the few traditional sign painters who is still practicing his craft in Saigon.

“My father used to run a workshop that made hand-painted signs in Đồng Tháp. I started learning about the trade when I was 13. I would go to school in the morning and help out at the workshop in the afternoon. I got the ropes of the job pretty quickly and my father recognized my potential, so naturally I followed in his footsteps.”

Traditionally, hand-painted signs employed a simple palette comprising red, blue, green, and yellow — primary shades for grabbing attention easily. In their heydays, these signs were a staple for businesses wishing to advertise their products and services. Such high demands kept Bảo’s family workshop booked and busy.

But as times changed, modern methods took over. Plastic lamination, acrylic panels, and LED lighting emerged as more eye-catching assets and soon dominated the market. Many artisans had to give up their trade due to declining income. As the number of customers seeking hand-painted signs dwindled, Bảo's family also made the difficult decision to abandon their lifelong work to keep the business going. “It was tough, and I was devastated. I thought my profession would fade into obscurity.”

In 2017, seeing how vintage aesthetics were trending again, Bảo took a leap of faith and relocated to Saigon to set up a new workshop. “I chose Saigon for a fresh start because there’s so much potential here. When all things nostalgic were becoming popular again, Saigon was one of the very first to embrace the trend," he said. "As I was starting from scratch, new customers didn't know who I was or what I was capable of. It took a lot of passion and sweat to pick up my brushes again and get to where I am today.”

Gradually, he was able to build a customer base steady enough to receive orders every day. Many clients from abroad who took a liking to Bảo designs even came to Vietnam themselves to pick them up. “I remember this one Japanese professor who loved Saigon so much that he visited me and ordered a sign with the '333' beer logo to decorate his office in Japan,” Bảo recalled.

According to the artist, a hand-painted sign's price ranges from VND800,000 to a few million đồng depending on its size. Unlike modern signs, these traditional signs cannot have “add-on” fixtures such as LED lights or letter cutouts. However, they can showcase a distinct brand identity and offer greater durability as well. The longer these signs are put on display, the more rugged and “authentic” of a look they acquire.

Bảo explained the meticulous process behind his work: “After receiving a request from a customer, I design a sample for them to review. If they agree with the design, I will proceed with measuring and welding a metal frame, then fit in onto a metal sheet. Next comes two coats of base paint, with each layer being painted four hours apart. Once the paint is completely dry, I begin sketching, outlining the details in pencil, and then adding in the colors.”

Bảo still uses Bạch Tuyết-brand paint, the same kind he used when he was just an apprentice to his father, as it's durable and reasonably priced while offering a variety of colors to choose from. The painter handles every step from gathering materials to finishing the sign, thus explaining the name of his shop “Một Mình Làm Hết” (lit: Do it all myself).

Since every part of the process is handled by Bảo, he sees each sign as his “child” and puts a lot of care into nurturing it. He told me, “When I'm out on the street, I can spot which signs I've made at a glance. I remember them all. In those moments, I feel proud because at least I know I've made some sort of contribution. And it's not just my own works that make me feel that way; whenever I come across any hand-painted sign, I feel joy.”

Throughout our conversation, Bảo also expressed his admiration for the late artisan Hoài Minh Phương, who devoted his entire life to preserving the art of hand-painted signs despite financial difficulties. Up until his recent passing, he was seen with brushes in hand.

“Up until now, I have a stable stream of orders, but I often worry if my work would become a lost art in the future. That's why I don’t keep any trade secrets. Anyone who wants to learn how to make hand-painted signs, I'm ready to share, so that together, we can preserve what's left of it.”

Memories and Heritage Considered Across Mediums at Dogma Prize Exhibition

2026-01-19T07:37:00+07:00

How can personal and collective memories – alongside questions of community and heritage – be explored through artistic practices that span different mediums and respond to changing times?

Entering its twelfth edition, the 2025 Dogma Prize Exhibition brings together nine artists from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia: Hà Đào, Đỗ Văn Hoàng, Lê Tuấn Ry, Willie Xaiwouth, Hằng Hằng, Hul Kanha, Nguyễn Đức Tín, Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn, and Bi Tuyền. Organized by Dogma Collection, this year’s selection was made by a jury including artist Thảo Nguyên Phan, curator Bill Nguyễn, and art historian Pamela Corey – each of whom mentored three artists during the entire process leading up to the exhibition.

A makeshift shelter stands at the end of the corridor upon one’s arrival, where ocean sounds and market noises emerge. Inside the shelter, Đỗ Văn Hoàng’s short film The Tofu Maker’s Son blends fiction and documentary to recount his family’s history in Hong Kong refugee camps and his father’s life as an undocumented worker. Structured like a series of court sessions, with re-staged police raids and conversations with his father, the film unfolds as a confrontational dialogue between past and present, examines painful memories of family displacement, while also leaving space for remembrance and healing.

Đỗ Văn Hoàng. The Tofu Maker’s Son, 2025. Short film, 20 mins 55s. Film still courtesy of the artist (left). Đỗ Văn Hoàng. Water Spinach, Garlic, Chili, Coke (audio), 2023 (right).

Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn’s series on miniature sculptures of everyday forms – Untitled (Notes on romance and cities), incorporates a system of feedback and sonic circuity, where street sounds, and melancholic music play on loop, as the objects remain hidden within wooden boxes along Dogma’s signature architectural structure. The installation evokes the feeling of mini theaters, with shifting backdrops behind a miniature couple, armchairs on a spinning stage, or flashing LED lights. The miniature works form a world on their own where time is trapped in repetition, with an emerging quiet sense of nostalgia and loneliness.

Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn. Untitled (Notes on romance and cities) 1, 2025. Plywood, stain, reversed clock mechanic, toy traffic light, LED running name tag (left). Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn. Untitled (Notes on romance and cities) 2, 2025. Plywood, stain, phone screen (right).

Inspired by Western modernist painting techniques, Bi Tuyền fuses them with Vietnamese domestic imagery and childhood nostalgia through her monochromatic painting Seven Green Beans. The absence of colors invites viewers to pause and pay attention to lights, shadows, and forms, with the artist asking: “Can black and white condense something essential?” Upon closer observation, one may notice the subtle traces of color beneath the monochromatic surface. Created amidst times of rapid cultural changes, the work resembles a moment of stillness – a reflection on what we choose to remember from the past as we move forward.

Bi Tuyền. Seven Green Beans, 2025. Acrylic on canvas.

Known for merging Catholic faith with Vietnamese traditional culture, Nguyễn Đức Tín’s Faith, features black mosquito nets with slits that partly reveal portraits of Our Lady of La Vang (Đức Mẹ La Vang) and the Christ Child, and Catholic martyrs between the 17th and 19th centuries. Their lives remain largely unknown, yet they upheld their faith despite tragic deaths. The layered mosquito nets represent concealed histories, memory, belief, and the passage of time. Alongside is the Heart series where viewers’ distorted reflection appears – where faith is reframed not solely for religious devotion, but for one’s purpose and inner strength.

Nguyễn Đức Tín. Faith, 2025. Watercolor, oil pastel, acrylic, mosquito net, canvas.

Spanning across three different levels in between the staircases, Willie Xaiwouth’s The Fading Breath of Forgotten Words presents script embroidered onto fabric, using bamboo flowers collected from his hometown Saiyabouli (Laos). Viewed from above, the Tai Tham script flows downwards along the fabric and slowly fades away. Belonging to the Tai Yuan people, descendants of the Lan Na Kingdom between the 13th and 18th centuries, now scattered across Laos and Thailand, Willie weaves together his own story and a fragile cultural legacy amidst changes of history and modern times.

Willie Xaiwouth. The Fading Breath of Forgotten Words, 2025. Handmade calico, bamboo flowers, Tai Yuan traditional skirts, cotton sewing threads.

In a reimagined alternative world, Hà Đào portrayed the notorious Hải Phòng female gangster Dung Hà as a transgender man wandering through the street like a ghostly figure in If Heaven Awaits. The work takes the form of a music video with 1990s Vietnamese aesthetics with Lam Trường’s ballad “Đêm Nay Anh Mơ Về Em”. Accompanied with the video work also features two laser-engraved crystal cubes, Castle I (Vũ Hoàng Dung’s Tomb) & Castle II (Đồ Sơn Casino), an empire that faded and now exists only in memory and imagination. Focusing on marginal lives, her works also resist and question mainstream narratives, stereotypes and social norms.

Hà Đào. If Heaven Awaits, 2024. Audio, video, 6 mins 39s. Castle I (Vũ Hoàng Dung’s Tomb) & Castle II (Đồ Sơn Casino), 2024 (left). Laser-engraved crystal cube, wooden stand, LED strip. Film still courtesy of the artist (right).

Unforgotten Land glows softly in a darkened space. Composed of hair stitched and pressed onto fabric by Hằng Hằng and her family, the work was created from a collective effort and speaks for family’s history and internal dynamics. The hair, gathered from her mother’s salon and the surrounding community, forms a surface resembling a fragile, scorched grassland. Each strand carries memories of war, conflicts, migration, yet also love and care. Through the material intimacy of hair, the work also reflects on what it means to collect, inherit, and carry historical legacies onward.

Hằng Hằng. Unforgotten Land, 2025. Hair, faux leather fabric.

Hul Kanha’s installation Plates of the Passed comprises fifty papier-mâché sculptures floating on thin poles across the space. Rendered with vibrant colours and childlike brushstrokes, the plates combine painted imagery, black-and-white photographs of childhood and family memories, sewn red threads, and gold paint. The brushstrokes and threads appear to hold cracks and lines together, while also evoking childhood trauma shaped by extreme hardship in rural Siem Reap. On these fragile surfaces, childhood memories are reworked through the artist’s adult perspective and personal recollection.

Hul Kanha. Plates of the Passed, 2025. Cycle paper, acrylic, sewing silk.

On the highest floor, Lê Tuấn Ry’s 18 Realms of Mound is placed behind a red curtain. Here, the visitors assume the role of spectators, activating a music box and observing a vertical row of CCTV screens that display a site-specific installation composed of old X-ray films of anonymous bodies – collected from clinics and hospitals and threaded together – located in an unknown, remote place. His work poses questions of surveillance and perception: "who is watching, who is being watched, and what becomes of that which slips outside the frame?"

Lê Tuấn Ry. 18 Realms of Mound, 2025. Old X-ray film, industrial safety pins, claw machine motors, car display screens, music boxes (installation block), water coconut fronds, charred wood, found steel base, aluminium profiles, asphalt, mother-of-pearl powder, red velvet curtains (screen block).

Dogma is a private collection and exhibition space dedicated to archival and contemporary art in and around Vietnam. Starting as a collection of revolutionary propaganda posters, the collection has since expanded into three interconnected programs: Collection, Research, and Prize. Now in its twelfth edition, the Dogma Prize has grown alongside Dogma Collection, evolving from an award focused on self-portraiture into a platform that celebrates the diversity of artistic practices across the region.

The 2025 Dogma Prize Exhibition is now on view at 27A Nguyễn Cừ, An Khánh Ward, Ho Chi Minh City until 28 February 2026.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's New Essay Collection Is Both Theoretically Sharp and Intimately Tender

2026-01-18T20:00:00+07:00

Last year, acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen published To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a collection of six essays adapted from the prestigious Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 2023–2024.

Writing and otherness are the central themes of the book. What does it mean to write as an other? To read as an other? What is, or should be, the relationship between self and otherness? Such are the questions that Nguyen is invested in in his latest book. And while his reflections upon these questions center around his own experiences as an Asian American and refugee, he demonstrates, importantly, that such questions are pertinent to all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, ethically, socially, and in some sense, existentially.

The insights that Nguyen offers in To Save and to Destroy are simultaneously theoretically sharp and intimately tender, a result of his seamless blending of autobiography and theory. Maneuvering between artful storytelling drawn from his own life and readings of critical and literary texts, he lets each shed light on the other. The result is a deft hybrid between art and criticism, combining the best strengths of both — a quality that great lectures most often have. That said, Nguyen’s book does not read like a lecture, and nor does it attempt to lecture at us. Rather, it simply asks to be heard, asks for its readers to think, feel, and reflect alongside its author.

For those who have read Nguyen’s previous works, the particular hybrid genre of To Save and to Destroy may strike as new, but it may oddly feel familiar as well — after all, Nguyen’s fiction has arguably always been theoretical, and his non-fiction, as his latest memoir A Man of Two Faces can attest, literary. Anyone who finds pleasure in reading theory as literature and literature as theory, To Save and to Destroy will be a delight to read, intellectually rich without being burdensome.

As it may already be apparent, the subtitle of Nguyen’s book, “writing as an other,” contains within it a multitude of meanings that he weaves through and together. To start, Nguyen is interested in two forms of otherness: one that is experienced via marginalization and domination, a form of otherness deeply personal to Nguyen as someone who came to the US as a young refugee from Vietnam, and a second form of otherness, perhaps more universal, that resides in the deepest parts of all of us. Nguyen explains:

By others, I mean those who are outcast from or exploited by the powerful norm of their societies, or those who have moved voluntarily or have been moved forcefully from one place to another, or those who have been dominated in their own homes by outsiders whom they would consider to be others. By others, I also mean ourselves, for as Toni Morrison points out in her Norton Lectures, The Origin of Others, otherness emerges from within the mysterious and unknown, or at best partly known, territory inside us all, a nexus of fears and desires we project onto those whom we label strangers, foreigners, enemies, invaders, threats.

For Nguyen, as the last part of the quote above makes clear, the two forms of otherness, while distinct, often intertwine in troubling ways. A central question of the book then, is how one should relate to the other, both within and outside the self. In the book’s preface, Nguyen explains that his lectures are an “attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.” If ethics and politics concern the question of how one should relate to others, the task of thinking through “writing as an other” is the starting point for ethical and political art precisely because it is in otherness that self and other meet, struggle, and relate.

In this respect, the chapter “Palestine and Asia” stands out, the corresponding lecture of which he delivered not long after the October 7 attacks in 2023. In raising the question of the significance of Israel-Palestine for Asian Americans, Nguyen comes to the following forceful conclusion.

Being Asian American is not the only dimension of myself. I cease being an Asian American if and when Asian Americans cannot emerge from self-defense, inclusion, and a limited solidarity bound by race and nation in order to embrace an expansive, global solidarity. My Asian Americanness matters less than my ethics, politics, and art. Together they constitute a repository of a stubborn otherness that resists the lure of a domesticated otherness satiated by belonging. For Asian Americans, inclusion is crucial but complicated when it means belonging to a settler and imperial country that promotes the colonization and occupation of other lands. What is the worth of defending our lives if we do not seek to protect the lives of others? As for whom we should feel solidarity with, the answer is simple, albeit difficult: whoever is the cockroach. Whoever is the monster.

Nguyen’s point is that belonging cannot, and should not, come at all costs, taking precedence over one’s ethics, politics, and art, nor over the pursuit of “radical solidarity” that cannot be bound by race or nation, but must extend to those who are most oppressed and dehumanized beyond our immediate communities. Importantly, Nguyen is not calling for a rejection of belonging or Asian American identity, but rather a transformation in how such belonging is understood in the first place — the values it should entail and the forms of solidarities it should call for. And such reworking of what Asian Americanness ought to mean is precisely what Nguyen seeks to engage in in deliberating upon, and performing, writing as an ethical and political act.

If, on the one hand, Nguyen is interested in “writing as an other” as an act, he is also interested in “writing as an other” as a noun, an object that “is itself an other to the writer.” This is, in fact, literally the case in the chapter “On Speaking for an Other,” in which he recounts rediscovering essays that he wrote long ago as a freshman in Berkeley for Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing seminar, specifically about his mother’s breakdown and her eventual commitment to a psychiatric ward. In rereading his own essays decades later, Nguyen realizes that his memories of the event were wrong, with crucial parts distorted or even entirely blacked out. He realizes that his mother had been committed to the psychiatric ward when he was a college freshman, not as a child as he thought for decades. He also learns about a hole in his bathroom door that he fails to recollect even after rereading his writing. His father had knocked it through in order to reach his mother who had locked herself in the bathroom out of a paranoiac fear that someone, or everyone, was trying to kill her.

If writing is other, it is in part because language itself is always already other, foreign, even in the form of one’s mother tongue, a point that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida elucidates in “Monolingualism of the Other,” a text Nguyen explicitly invokes. But writing is other also because it reflects the otherness that is an inherent and irreducible condition of existence itself. As Nguyen reflects upon the aforementioned episode, he writes, “if the experience was so unsettling that I had to write about it, it was also so unnerving that I had to forget about it until my mother died two days before Christmas Eve in 2018.” In some sense, Nguyen’s trauma was itself an other within himself that he could not bear nor confront — which is why he “had to” write about it, “had to” in order to externalize it into words on a page so that it could be stored away and forgotten.

As Nguyen explains, the experience of being a refugee is often one that must inevitably face the question, “will they live or die, be saved or destroyed?” But what about in writing? As the title of Nguyen’s book indicates, in “writing as an other,” salvation and destruction do not necessarily exist in binary opposition but rather in odd cohesion. In writing about his mother, and in rereading his writing, what has he saved? destroyed? The memories of his mother, both, no doubt, but perhaps also himself — a contradiction only if we cling onto a notion of self that excludes from itself otherness.

But even as the encounter with otherness — both of one’s own as well as of loved ones — can be deeply unsettling, traumatic even, Nguyen insists that such an encounter can also possess unexpected joys. In the last paragraph of the book, Nguyen describes his sister Tuyết, whom his family abandoned in fleeing Vietnam (and who, as was unknown at the time, was adopted), visiting San José to see their sick father, whom she had last seen three decades ago.

Love was what brought my sister to the United States, to see her brothers but most especially, I think, our father. After Los Angeles, my sister flew to San José to visit him, whom she had not seen since his last visit to Việt Nam thirty years before. Our father spends his days in quiet contemplation, and when I return, he either does not recognize me or pretends to recognize me, his other, as he is other to me. I warned my sister that our father would probably not know who she was, but this did not appear to deter her. When she walked into his room, she told me later, she asked him if he recognized her. In a moment of reunion and recognition that I think of as manifesting the joy of otherness, he murmured an assent. Then our father said, “Vui lắm.” And my sister was content that our father said he was very happy.

The otherness of Nguyen’s sister, the otherness of his father, the otherness of their encounter with each other — in this extraordinary scene, a multitude of layers of otherness overlap and collide, each bearing its own painful history. Yet in this encounter, we witness the emergence of a plurality of joys too, each felt differently by his sister, his father, and Nguyen himself. The “joy of otherness” resounds here, but it also remains opaque, not least of all because it remains unclear what their father exactly meant by “Vui lắm.” Perhaps he recognized Tuyết. Perhaps he was happy to see her regardless of who she was. Perhaps he was joyous for a different reason altogether.

But perhaps the question of why does not matter so much. If the joy of otherness, and the multitude of joys that reverberate from it, cannot but be opaque, it is because the joy of otherness is itself also, ultimately, deeply other.

In Sa Pa, Learning How to Indigo Dye, One Plant, Vat, and Beeswax Pen at a Time

2026-01-11T07:00:00+07:00

My first meal in Sa Pa was accidentally earned. After a few hours of uneven rest in a sleeper bus and a short ride from Sa Pa city center to the village, I finally arrived, along with two other indigo enthusiasts, at a small hill in bản Cát Cát. A few modest houses framed a quiet courtyard where indigo vats rested, and long strips of dyed fabric hung on bamboo poles, drying in the morning air.

Lush scenery of Bản Cát Cát.

Shortly after arriving, we met Mi in the courtyard. She led us into her grandmother’s house, where she was splitting corn kernels from the cob while her grandmother worked the stove. We each took a small stool and joined her by the fire. When breakfast came, we were handed bowls and chopsticks, despite our minimal help and last-minute arrival. Sautéed bamboo shoots, simmered pork, and plenty of rice: simple, filling, and comforting. That meal set the tone for the days ahead: we would be mildly useful, gently active, and always rewarded with food made with care.

Hmong indigo pattern with traditional beeswax pen.

After breakfast, we met the remaining students, and Nhái and Nủ, the couple who ran the four-day indigo class we had come for. It covers the main stages of the process: harvesting the plant, fermenting it using an anaerobic method (traditional to the Hmong community of the area), making indigo paste, and learning a selection of dye techniques. I joined after having seen scenes from one of their classes pop up on my social media feed last year. Small groups of people sat around a log of coal used to melt the beeswax needed to create patterns on fabric before dyeing. Another picture showed them in the woods, listening to Nủ explain something. Then there was a graduation shot, where everyone is showing their final dyed product. And all of it with Sa Pa’s greenery and wooden houses in the backdrop. Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ felt unassuming, yet their classes seemed inviting and fun.

Learning about fabric properties with Nhái (bottom right corner).

When asked why she didn’t offer shorter, workshop-style classes, Nhái explained how she wanted students to experience the dye’s rhythm and living nature. The vats required care: we took turns, during our sojourn, stirring them to incorporate oxygen and keep the extract from settling, covering them from rain, and regularly checking and testing them for alkalinity and dye strength, especially after each use. The dye also needed warmth and time to ferment. We learned to read the signs of a healthy vat and to recognize when one was falling short.

The indigo dye process with bubbles visible due to fermentation.

From curiosity to Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ

Originally hailing from Hải Phòng, Nhái moved to Hanoi for university. With a keen interest in all things DIY and handicraft, she taught herself how to sew, to embroider, to bake, and to bind books. Certain that office life was not for her, she began making and selling handmade work while finishing her studies.

She first experimented with heat dye processes, using natural dye materials such as lá bàng, onion peels, and avocado pitt, before eventually learning about indigo dye. During this early period, Nhái partnered with a friend to learn and experiment with indigo dye together, selling their work under the same brand. In 2016, as their needs and directions diverged, they went their separate ways: Nhái continued with Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ, while her friend founded Đu Đủ, which now focuses on indigo dye in interior design.

As her focus deepened on indigo dye, her curiosity shifted towards the plant itself, sparking an interest in cultivation and farming. She began paying closer attention to the food she ate and the plants around her. Nhái then felt the need for more space to dye and grow, something Hanoi could not offer.

Preperation of simple, healthy meals is shared by attendees of the Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ indigo dye class.

In 2018, Nhái moved to a small farm in Lạng Sơn, staying for a year before planning to relocate to the Ngọc Linh Mountains to set up a new workspace with a friend and business partner. While waiting, Nhái went to Cát Cát to help Nủ, a recently made friend at the time, to build what is now their current house, all while continuing to deepen her knowledge of indigo dye through local practices. When the farm in Ngọc Linh did not turn out as expected, and the move was no longer possible, Nhái decided to stay in Cát Cát. She and Nủ would later get married and have Mì, their daughter, in 2023.

Starting a new dye vat.

After settling in Cát Cát, Nhái began teaching classes and continued to grow Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ, all while consigning her work at friends’ shops in Hanoi. When she became pregnant with Mì, Nủ stepped in to help with the business. Despite coming from different cultures, the two grew into a seamless partnership, balancing work and family life. Nủ would lead our group into the forest to harvest indigo, while Nhái guided textile choices and dyeing techniques, and ensured Mì gets her daily naps.

Before the class began, we were told to be mindful of the inorganic waste we brought with us and to take it back for disposal after our stay. Upon arrival, it became clear that while their environmental practices are not perfect, they are intentional and grounded in the realities of their surroundings. Plastic bags are kept and reused; milk cartons are washed, cut, and kept to bring back to Hanoi for recycling, if not already repurposed. Solid soap is bought by the kilo for all purpose use. In the kitchen, an informal compost bucket collects organic scraps for later use in gardening. Most importantly, no pesticides are used — not on the garden greens cooked for meals, nor on the hill where indigo is grown.

Dying the fabric (left) and Nủ melting beeswax to reveal the final product (right).

Currently, the indigo they can grow is not sufficient for their needs. This meant needing to buy indigo paste from other farmers, who are not always willing to forego pesticides, even when offered higher prices. Life in the mountains is harsh; using pesticides and chemical fertilizers has become common practice, as they speed up growth, reducing time and labor. They were often introduced as a miracle solution, without any acknowledgement of their toxic properties that degrade soil health, harm biodiversity, and pollute water and air. Persuading more indigo farmers to lessen or eliminate these chemicals remains an active effort.

A successful team harvest for indigo.

Adding to this, the growing interest in indigo dye in Vietnam has led to more places offering similar products. For Nhái, it’s an ongoing internal negotiation to put out work that meets her standards yet remains appealing and accessible. Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ relies largely on collaboration with small local brands who seek her out for hand-dyed fabrics with specific pattern designs. For example, here is an Áo Tấc from the brand Đông Phong, made with fabric dyed by Nhái.

Any profit from the class is reinvested in their infrastructure, improving living and communal spaces for students to learn and cook during our stay. With Sa Pa’s high altitude making construction materials costly to transport, progress is gradual. In the long run, Nhái also hopes to invest in herself, to further her education in indigo dye, and learn new techniques from other parts of the world.

A peaceful morning view from the dorms' windows.

Outside of work, Nhái and Nủ envision developing more social projects for local youth. Nhái sees a great value in indigo dye as a craft, but local youth seem less and less interested. Today, many are encouraged after ninth grade to learn a trade and/or work in the service sector, as tourism in the region continues to grow and demand more labor. The couple hopes to preserve their cultural practices, as well as expose younger generations to more creative paths.

When asked about what she considers her proudest achievement, Nhái frankly shared, “In truth, I feel a bit self-conscious for not coming from a creative background. Because of it, I always feel that I’m not skilled enough, that my work could always be better. Of course, after some time thinking this way, looking back, I realize that I actually did well. I tried and did my best at the time, so it’ll be ok.”

How to dye using indigo, the four-day teaser

A refreshing dip in the river after the first day of learning about indigo dye.

Time spent in Cát Cát held more depth than expected. We moved slowly and followed the curriculum flexibly, yet time never felt ill spent. After our first day, we took a spontaneous hike to the river with Nhái and Nủ’s nieces, bathing in the fresh water of the falls.

On our third day, we spent hours by a small fire that kept our beeswax melted, as we drew and sewed, helping one another through projects that were sometimes more ambitiously time-consuming. My fellow course-mates all opted for a bigger rectangular hand-woven fabric (180cm x 40cm), which can be used as a scarf, tablecloth, or turned into an ornamental piece. I chose the other option, a square linen piece (70cm x 70cm), that I intended to use as a headscarf or a neckerchief. At the beginning of the course, we were shown different pieces from Nhái and Nủ’s collection, finished and ongoing projects, as well as pieces made by Nủ’s family, for their own use.

A traditional Hmong indigo dye pattern.

They very kindly let me buy one of Nủ’s old jackets, dyed and sewn by his mom when he was still a boy. Their clothing has a distinctive shoulder built, that drops well into the sleeves, almost reaching one’s elbows. This simple structure removes all sharpness, giving the jacket a softer overall look. The fabric has seen many dye vats throughout the years, retaining its dark and vibrant blue. The garment is completed with dangling small metallic bell-shaped buttons and has white stains on the left sleeve, remnants of renovation work done by Nủ recently, when he decided to throw on his old jacket for added warmth. When they sold me the jacket, they considerately tried to remove the stains. I thought about embroidering over it, but have since decided against it, as it gave me yet another excuse to share anecdotes about my time in Cát Cát and the people behind Nhặt Lá, Đá Ống Bơ.

Through their collection, we were able to better understand the rendering of different techniques, aiding our own design process. My project combined beeswax use, which protects the fabric against dye, creating negative space, with layering dye to get different indigo shades, and shibori stitching. The result is a patchwork composition. Others had a more defined vision, opting to focus on one technique only to create a cohesive design.

The group works on their designs while Nủ grills chicken.

Nủ shifted between guiding us and grilling chicken over that same fire meant for the beeswax, meat he had marinated that morning, while we studied with Nhái. Many meals were prepared in slight confusion and not without tension, as our little group was only getting to know one another in an unfamiliar setting. Still, we always came together whenever Nhái brought out baked goods. Shokupan for breakfast on our second day, cream puffs to celebrate our graduation, and milk bread that was meant to last a couple of days, but was quickly devoured on our fourth-day hike to Tả Vân, while we waited for our dye vats to ferment.

Graduation cream puffs that Mì eyes with anticipation.

I left Cát Cát with a deeper appreciation for indigo dye as a craft and its deep roots in Hmong culture. Since then, I try to incorporate the same focused intention and active curiosity in my daily life that came so naturally during my stay. On my phone now sits our own graduation photo and an ongoing group chat, where our cohort continues to share tips, discoveries, and reflections on indigo dye.

Graduation picture with Nhái (third from the left).

Hanoi Indie Duo Limebócx Brings Tried-and-Trù Traditions to Young Ears

2026-01-08T11:00:00+07:00

A grazing buffalo, frolicking water puppets, mystifying tam cúc cards, an insolent maiden in áo tứ thân, a rustic meal around cái mâm. These are just a few standout visuals that will haunt your brain upon feasting your eyes on Limebócx’ debut music video ‘Yêu Nhau (Qua Cầu Gió Bay).’

Amidst bewildering characters and surreal segments that seem to have been spontaneously glued together in a chaotic fever dream, Tuấn and Chuối — the founding members of Hanoi indie duo Limebócx — appear as the only semblance of normalcy reassuring viewers that they’re watching a music video and not tripping balls. The pair first met through a jam session at the Rec Room community years ago, but only played music together during a music exchange program in South Korea, they told Whammy Bar in an interview. The founding of Limebócx started from an unknown mishmash of influences that didn’t fit in any particular genres but sounded relaxing when đàn tranh was added to the mix. Over time, the sight of a beatboxing Tuấn hunching over his trusty loop station and Chuối cranking out sultry bass licks or a đàn tranh solo would go on to become a beloved familiar image in the mind of fans starting from the duo’s debut in 2019.

In 2023, the renaissance of traditional Vietnamese elements in the local music landscape is so prevalent that you can’t walk two blocks in any metropolitan area without bumping into a fusion pop hit blasting from a bubble tea parlor or sidewalk coffee cart. Names like Hoàng Thùy Linh, Hòa Minzy, Văn Mai Hương, and K-ICM have all found success of varying degrees with new chart-topping tracks featuring facets of Vietnamese culture, from folk instruments like đàn nhị or đàn tranh to ancient literary classics. This appreciation for local flavors in mainstream pop productions has been bubbling away for half a decade or so, but is fully flourishing in 2023. Back in 2019, the release of Limebócx’ EP “Electrùnic” was the first time I saw zither and classical poetry having a place in such a contemporary, sleek and exciting context.

The cover of the extended play "Electrùnic."

Even with just a handful of songs, Electrùnic demonstrated a coherent creative vision that rose above the music landscape at the time. The debut extended play includes four tracks: ‘Yêu Nhau (Qua Cầu Gió Bay),’ the first to premiere, is based on the quan họ Bắc Ninh mainstay ‘Qua Cầu Gió Bay’; ‘Mục Hạ Vô Nhân’ and ‘Hồ Tây’ weave in poetry by 19^th-century literary powerhouse Nguyễn Khuyến; and ‘Chiều Trù Nhật’ takes inspiration from ca trù, another form of folk singing. Beatboxing, bass, echoing loops, and đàn tranh intermingle as the simmering base for Chuối’s deliciously viscous line delivery. It’s as if slam poetry has a dalliance with electronica during a quan họ performance.

Limebócx 2.0

Hà Đăng Tùng (left) and Lê Trang (right), the current roster of Limebócx.

Watching ‘Dung Họa,’ Limebócx’ latest single and music video released back in February, you might notice a new face in the member roster. Last year, Hanoi bid farewell to Tuấn as he embarked on a new academic journey in Australia, and the group welcomed a new member in the form of Hà Đăng Tùng, who brought his passion for electronic music into the tapestry of Limebócx. I met Tùng and Chuối for the first time via virtual call as they were drowned out by the cacophony of a random coffee shop in Hanoi. It was hard for me not to feel intimidated, as a self-proclaimed Limebócx groupie, to sit face-to-face with the people behind the songs that have accompanied me through numerous flights, night showers, and languorous Saturday nights lying on the floor feeling every beat.

My attempts to dispel the initial awkwardness with small-talk questions went about rather poorly, though many random things I’ve been wondering were answered. Chuối, meaning banana in Vietnamese, is the affectionate nickname of Lê Trang. As she was growing up, Trang’s father referred to her by a plethora of pet names depending on his mood, but only “Chuối” has stuck until now. Her favorite fruit? Not banana, but jackfruit. Is there a special story behind the band name? Nope, before a performance back in the early days, they were asked about the name of their act, so they fused together “chanh/lime” (đàn tranh) and “bócx” (beatbox). Limebócx was born and the rest is history.

Limebócx before a performance at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi.

The indie music scene in Hanoi was as small as can be and Tùng and Tuấn were already friends way back then, so it was a natural progression that Tùng stepped in to form Limebócx 2.0. “I was ‘coerced’ maybe three, four times [to join Limebócx]. After four, five nhậu sessions, I finally had to say yes,” Tùng tells me. “I already knew both of them. At the beginning, it was challenging as I didn’t know where to start, and the band already has an established image, so it was tough for me to fit in.”

Long-term followers of the independent music scene in Hanoi might already recognize the prolific “pedigree” of the members. Chuối was a segment of Hanoi quintet Gỗ Lim, iconic punk legends of the 2000s, and is currently the bassist for rock/metal group Windrunner. Also known as Đờ Tùng, Tùng studied Classical Guitar at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi and is a member of several music entities, such as Bluemato, Phác Họa Xanh and Ngầm. Becoming a part of Limebócx, Tùng brought to the table a distinctive touch of electronic music, something that he has already been exploring in his personal endeavors, along with experimental and ambient sounds.

Not too cool for school

From nhậu mates to bandmates.

No matter which version of Limebócx one’s observing, they always ooze an effortless wellspring of coolness. Making a world of percussive sounds using just one’s mouth movements, gliding easily between traditional and contemporary instruments, and smashing together east and west, old and new — none of these are easy feats for newbies. Cool, however, is not exactly the first adjective one would associate with many of Vietnam’s traditional performing art forms. Quan họ, ca trù, chèo, đờn ca tài tử, hò, tuồng, xòe, and many more, all have rich histories, involve meticulous techniques, and are shining examples showcasing the country’s profoundly diverse cultures, but one is more likely to catch them at tourist sites and academic television documentaries than in the minds of young Vietnamese. Nguyễn Khuyến, whose vịnh poems inspired a number of Limebócx songs, is a mainstay author in the national high school literature syllabus, and thus, tends to evoke memories of exam-related dread rather than a sense of fascination among youths. This is all to say that there isn’t an obvious bridge between classical poetry and electronic music, but somehow Limebócx managed to make schoolwork thrilling.

There isn’t an obvious bridge between classical poetry and electronic music, but somehow Limebócx managed to make schoolwork thrilling.

Much of the link to traditional influences came from Chuối, who credited her interest in reading and poetry to the literature lessons back in high school. “In high school, we are taught so many types of fiction and poetry. There were things I really hate, but there were things I thought were cool and resonated with me,” she reminisces. Nguyễn Khuyến is perhaps best known for a trio of poems revolving around autumn: ‘Thu Điếu’ (Autumn Fishing), ‘Thu Ẩm’ (Autumn Drinking) and ‘Thu Vịnh’ (On Autumn). “I like things like that, a bit of romanticism in there, like taking a walk, appreciating the flowers, sipping some rice wine,” Chuối adds.

No matter which version of Limebócx one’s observing, they always ooze an effortless wellspring of coolness.

In between verses of poetry, the music of Limebócx is truncated by metallic licks of đàn tranh, our version of 16-string zither and a major factor contributing to the duo’s unique fusion sounds. Chuối received an old đàn tranh as a gift, but found the traditional instrument too challenging, so she didn’t touch it for a long time. When she started making music with Tuấn during the early days of the band, she decided to give it another chance. The next era of Limebócx might or might not see the addition of guitar phím lõm in its soundscape, something that Tùng is experimenting with after he was given one by a friend. This six-string lute is the Vietnamese adaptation of the European guitar, albeit with scalloped neck spaces between frets; this modification was designed to produce the reverberating sound commonly heard in southern cải lương.

Finding a new balance for a new album

Following a few years of relative quietude, Limebócx confirms with me that they’re indeed working on the next record, an album that pays tribute to the band’s old self, in-transition self, and new self. There’s a sprinkle of throwbacks to the first extended play, but with more of Tùng’s input. There’s an exploration of Limebócx as a trio, as evidenced in the latest single ‘Dung Họa.’ And of course, there’s Limebócx 2.0, much of which we don’t know about yet, but the making of which is a process of experimentation that they enjoy. Long-time supporters will be able to find the traditional elements they know and love about the duo, but electronic music will play a bigger role than before, adding more weight to the new record.

The new direction will lean more towards electronic, Tùng's forte, while retaining the traditional references that fans know and love about the band.

“Tùng has been in the group for a year, but at the beginning, we were just trying to get to know each other,” Chuối says of the process of making new music. “For the new album, I want to ‘exploit’ this one [points to Tùng] as much as possible so that it will turn out to be something with a lot of his personality and voice too.”

“I hope it will turn out okay,” Tùng quips. “I think it’s quite dope when I listen to it, but I don’t know what people will think.”

Limebócx’ biggest wish ever since the band’s founding is to bring their music and more traditional Vietnamese materials to the international stage. For decades now, local music has struggled to find a footing in bigger arenas, but there are glimmers of a very Vietnamese identity that are starting to shine through — in projects by Hoàng Thùy Linh, Dzung, and Limebócx, for example. After decades of learning from developed industries, perhaps we’re finally at a point where we can grow what we learned into a unique and personal sound.

What’s Limebócx’ biggest dream?

Chuối: Perform with a symphonic orchestra. Or even better, a traditional orchestra.

Tùng: Glastonbury. [laughs]

Photos courtesy of Limebócx.

This article was originally published in 2023.

In His Research-Driven Artistic Practice, Quang deLam Maps History, Knowledge Together

2026-01-04T10:00:00+07:00

What if art functions as a visual form for transmitting knowledge and entangled histories, and the artist is a messenger between them and the audience?

With an academic background in image sciences and professional career in digital media, French-Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist Quang deLam (Quang Lam) works across photography, painting and installation. His artistic process is often research-driven, where he starts from looking into science, history and geography, and with archival materials playing a significant role. This approach is reflected throughout his works included in his first solo exhibition “Seas of Silk” (2025) at Lotus Gallery and in the group exhibition “Archive and Post-Archive” at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) as a part of Biennale Photo Hanoi 2025.

Quang deLam next to his work ‘Tales from the Land of Dragons’ (2025) as a part of “Archive and Post-archive,” Biennale Photo Hanoi 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.

His exploration of different materials and media is closely linked to his scientific background and inspired by Marshall McLuhan's well-known phrase, “The medium is the message,” from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). McLuhan’s idea implies that the communication medium itself is the message, and the form of the message determines the way the message is perceived — which resonates strongly in Quang’s practice. He initially worked primarily with photography, a medium often associated with “conveying the truth,” but became interested in how the same knowledge can be perceived differently when “translated” onto different mediums. Through the re-composition of objects and forms, painting allows him to reorganize visual information and alter how the truth is constructed and perceived by the audience. Since 2022, this has marked a shift in his practice as he became fully engaged in art-making by expanding beyond photography into painting and installation, alongside his research on science and history.

Quang Lam's series of paintings and installations, recently presented in the solo exhibition “Seas of Silk” (2025) at Lotus Gallery, draws on the history of the maritime Silk Road, shipwrecked ceramics, ancient civilization, and their surrounding narratives. Developed through his research of maps and astrology, as a combination of different materials and historical references, the bodies of works invites viewers to consider the inter-relationship between these histories, the way we view histories that we had never lived in but could only imagine and find out through historical sources, with connections to our contemporary world.

Installation view of ‘Seas of silk’ (2025) at Lotus Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The central installation depicts a shipwreck scene with broken ceramic fragments scattered on the ground. The paintings incorporate representations of the silk road expeditions, using the Maokun map as a reference, alongside motifs drawn from shipwrecked ceramics from museum collections and transformed into iconography. In ‘Cocoon’ (2025) and ‘Pegasus cells’ (2025), the centrally placed cocoon shape references the process of silk production. Surrounding this are images of corals and motifs from Chu Đậu ceramics, such as the mythical pegasus, a bird on a tree branch, shrimps, and flowers — all rendered in iconographic forms in bright, vibrant colors and clean lines. While the compositions evoke a sense of collage and abstraction, this reveals the artist’s process: collecting images and artifacts, turning them into iconographic elements, and arranging them on the paintings.

‘Cocoon,’ 2025. 100 x 80cm. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist

‘Pegasus cells,’ 2025. 80 x 60cm. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In other paintings, such as ‘Dancing with the storm’ (2025) and ‘Oc Eo Aurora’ (2025), the imagery shifts towards sea and mountainous terrains, depictions of the wind currents, and shipwreck scenes. One work depicts ships coming from afar, with silhouettes of ancient Oc Eo statues appearing across the horizon. The main reference behind these paintings is the historic Mao Kun map, also known as Zheng He’s Navigation Map, published in 1628 during China’s Ming dynasty. Originally created as a rollable strip map documenting coastal regions and islands along the maritime routes, it is considered to be the earliest known Chinese map on the maritime Silk Road connecting different parts of Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa. By adopting this Asian map as a reference, Quang intentionally moves away from the Eurocentric perspectives that have long dominated historical mapping and education.

‘Oc Eo Aurora,’ 2025. 80 x 100cm. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

‘Dancing with the storm,’ 2025. 80 x 100cm. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

For the artist, maps themselves function as a kind of “abstract” art, even though they were not originally created with artistic intention. Ancient navigators recorded mountains, rivers, and terrains encountered during their journey, where lived experiences are translated into a system of measurement. While maps are often discussed from a geographical and political perspective, they are rarely considered within the context of art. This perspective made Quang highlight the importance of scientific knowledge beyond how mainstream art history is often written, which tends to focus on stylistic development.

Beyond cartography, Quang deLam also researches astrology, the use of astrolabes and compasses, acknowledging that navigators in the past relied on the stars in the sky to navigate their way through darkness, whether on land or at sea. For him, one of the most fundamental ways to understand the world is through measurement: time measured by the clock, directions determined by the compass, and position in relation to the stars measured through the astrolabe. These systems explain the different layers of his artistic and research practices, as well as different materials, with the aim of creating works that embody a sense of time and space.

‘Made in Far-East,’ 2025. 80 x 80cm. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

‘Astrolabs Saigon–Hanoi’ (2024) features an astrolabe-like structure, composed of large ruler forms positioned at the top, paired with die-cut plexiglass panels engraved with city maps. Beneath the plexiglass layer is a painted star chart, alongside archived letters with destinations written on the envelopes. According to the artist, the constellations depicted in the work are calculated according to the specific date on the letters, determining the positions of the stars at that moment. The letters contain names of senders and recipients from different locations, with postal stamps and sending and receiving dates, providing the basic geographic information of who, where and when. Collected by the artist, the letters themselves are artifacts representing lived histories of movement, measurement, and communication.

‘Astrolabs Hanoi–Saigon,’ 2024. 90 x 36cm. Inox, plexiglass, wood, paper, postcard. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Returning to photography with an emphasis on archival materials accumulated throughout the years, Quang deLam’s “Tales from the Land of Dragons” (2025) was recently featured in the large-scale group exhibition “Archive and Post-archive” (2025) at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA), curated by Đỗ Tường Linh and Éline Gourgues, as part of the Biennale Photo Hanoi 2025. The installation centers an index drawer surrounded by stacks of white boxes and books, with dragonfruits placed on top and inside the index drawer, and some in between the book stacks. These elements are connected by a dense network of electric wires and threads, with photography works of dragonfruits and books staged within old libraries on display in the background.

Installation view of ‘Tales from the Land of Dragons’ (2025) as a part of “Archive and Post-archive,” Biennale Photo Hanoi 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The work took inspiration from the Vietnamese origin myth “Con rồng cháu tiên,” which depicts the Vietnamese people as descendants born from 100 eggs laid by the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the fairy Âu Cơ; following their separation, 50 eggs were taken to the mountains while 50 returned to the ocean. In this installation, according to the exhibition text, the work “takes the fruits of the dragons [dragon fruits] as the symbol of the eggs, and along the various pictures combines with architectural and book elements to compose the timeline of contemporary Vietnam.” By linking this myth with the modern and contemporary Vietnamese history, which was marked by upheavals and violence, the work reflects on the shifting access to knowledge: from the colonial period, where it was largely restricted to a small number of intellectual elite, to the post-independence period when public libraries play an important role in making cultural resources and knowledge accessible to the public. The photography installation itself in this case represents an archive of knowledge and a timeline of cultural memory.

Installation view of ‘Tales from the Land of Dragons’ (2025) as a part of “Archive and Post-archive,” Biennale Photo Hanoi 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.

As much of his practice centers on history and knowledge, Quang deLam employs archival materials and research to bridge science and art, while reflecting on the nature of knowledge itself, and the significant role of human consciousness. “Knowledge comes first, then our consciousness and then followed by our actions. If you have knowledge but without consciousness, there’s no meaning in your action. The same thing applies to art, where action needs to be guided,” Quang deLam shared with Saigoneer.

For the artist, art functions as a means of knowledge and a prophecy: it is not about his own self-expression, but about transmitting understanding to the viewer, positioning the artist as a messenger. In this increasingly complex world — where distinctions between what is real and what is fabricated are often blurred — he believes that art plays a vital role in cultivating awareness and critical engagement with new knowledge, rather than relying on inherited moral principles passed down through generations.

Photos courtesy of Quang deLam.

In the Era of AI Slop, I've Learned to Embrace Saigon's Ugly Urban Clutters

2025-12-29T11:00:00+07:00

To live in Saigon is to coexist with clutter. Chaos is perhaps to be expected, when one’s habitat is a gargantuan crowded compressed narrow concretized megalopolis of over 10 million people, but few cities I’ve been to are as cluttered as Saigon.

On the ground, your shoes have to maneuver around physical clutter: parked motorbikes, styrofoam, old slippers, durian rinds, chairs, a web of random strings, wires, and plastics. In the air, the clamor of audio clutter drones on, clanking, thrumming, shrieking, yowling, and bonking away day and night.

Born and raised in Saigon, I’ve evolved to accept them, but for reasons unknown, I’ve never made peace with the city’s visual clutters: signboards, shopfronts, and posters in generic typefaces and contrasting colors of red, yellow, white, hot pink, and every hue in between. I despised them — corpulent letters that scream for our eyes’ attention in their soundless, gaudy rage.

They started popping up in the 2000s and have infected all corners of Saigon’s commercial streets, like a corrosive urban mold digesting local architecture and expelling migraine-inducing spores. I blame the advent of cheap and easily accessible printing technologies for this blight; we can print anything nowadays, but does it mean we should? At the risk of propagating yet another Saigoneer cliché, I remember a time when signage was an art and not just a means to an end: when every sign was hand-painted.

Advertising predates the age of rampant visual clutter by a good few decades, and without instantaneous prints, our parents’ generation relied on the skills and artistry of painters to adorn shopfronts. I’ve long wondered why retro signage appeals to me so much, and came to realize that it’s not the fact that it’s old, but the fact that it’s human. Humanity, unlike machines, is prone to imperfections. A little kerning inconsistency. A fatter brushstroke here and there. An irregular, cheeky twirl at the end of a “Y.” Imperfections are interesting and authentic.

Nostalgia is an ever-churning cycle. In the 2000s and 2010s, I yearned for the hand-painted goodness of the 1970s. Today, in the 2020s, I find myself strangely drawn to the kitschy clutter of the 2000s. It is increasingly exhausting to exist as a creature with eyes in the 2020s, when AI slop is cluttering every corner of our world. It is soul-draining to have to be on alert 24/7, to scrutinize every human figure’s hands, every online cat’s fur pattern, every video’s narrative logic just to detect signs of AI. And there will come a time when the technology has progressed so much that our human brains can’t tell reality from slop anymore. With the release of Dildo Banana Promax — or whatever the fuck Google is puking out these days — I fear that day is already here.

A few days ago, I was on a run and stopped at a red light. I looked up, and there, right in front of my eyes, was a signboard for a bike-fixing shop, all decked out in 2000s-style bombastic palette of red letters on yellow background. However, one letter was hanging on by a thread and the sign corners were covered in moss. And the pièce de résistance was that instead of “sửa xe” (fix bikes), the sign reads “sữa xe” (bike milk). It brought a smile to my face.

Take that, AI slop. Saigon’s visual clutter might be hideous, but it is also incredibly human. As a final act of resistance, I will start loving all shitty art from all eras and all genres, as long as a human created it. It might be shitty, but at least it is ours.

On Grappling With a Consumerist Christmas in Saigon

2025-12-26T11:00:00+07:00

Growing up in America, Christmas meant arriving at my grandmother's house and immediately devouring a handmade gingerbread cookie drenched in sugar; driving with my Dad to “candy cane lane,” where homeowners took particular pride in stringing colorful lights on their gutters, windows and frontyard pines; and sneaking to our living room’s Christmas tree at 5am to sit in the dark staring at the presents, waiting until my mom said we were allowed to wake up and open them. Christmas began when Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas songs played on the long ride home from Thanksgiving with relatives and continued through snowy Christmas tree lots, studies paused for classroom parties with pizza and soda pop, and the 1966 Grinch cartoon played on repeat.

Santa Clause 1863 apperance on Harper's Weekly established his apperance has a fat, white-bearded man. Photo via Wikimedia.

Modern Christmas is, in many ways, intrinsically American. European immigrants to New York brought with them a variety of Christian traditions influenced by pagan rituals, and in the 19^th century’s stupefying swirl of capitalist industrialization, we got Santa Claus, Christmas lights and piles of packages containing the year’s newest toys. Disparate activities such as German wassailing songs and decorated trees, English greeting cards, and St. Nikkolas giving gifts to Dutch children all came together in America’s diverse cities, and became coated in a glimmering shade of consumerism aided by Hollywood and the day’s popular media, particularly Harper's Weekly. The holiday shed its rowdy associates and became the premier time for cherished family togetherness, largely independent of any religious belief. It’s a straight path from there to Hallmark Christmas movies, Toyotathon deals, and peppermint lattes.

Christmas decoration shops pop up in Vietnamese cities around the holidays, such as these seen in Hanoi.

I offer that as a necessary preface for how I understand Christmas in Saigon. With each passing year, the city seems to embrace it with increased fervor: Mariah Carey sings in Circle Ks selling Christmas tree-shaped pastries, coffee shops hang wreaths and serve candy cane drinks, and nightclubs announce fake snow events. Red and white trinkets, knickknacks and geegaws abound. On December 24, I passed through a hẻm where a local man dressed up like Santa was handing out packages to neighborhood kids assembled for a party beneath lights that had been strung by a man standing on a motorbike. Before Saigoneer had December 25 off, we held an office gift exchange. Huge crowds gather at the large churches as an entertainment spectacle.

Tân Định Church is brightly decorated for the holiday, while Christmas Eve mass attracts so many onlookers that they spill into the street and obstruct traffic.

With a few exceptions, it seems that Saigon has embraced the most bombastic, capitalist elements of the modern American Christmas. It is a shimmering but harmless distraction at best, a soulless carnival for corporate marketing departments at worst. America’s most wholesome facet of the holiday: a day off to gather with rarely seen family, is difficult, if not impossible, for many, with only rushed evening gatherings taking place.

Meanwhile, an evil history lurks in the margins of Saigon’s Christmas. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” was the coded signal used by the US military on April 29, 1975 to began the evacuation, as alluded to in Ocean Vuong’s poem ‘Aubade with Burning City.’ The charming old photos of 1960s and 1970s Christmases cannot be seen outside the context of the war, death and destruction wrought by the soldiers for whom the decorations were strung up to satisfy.

Christmas in Saigon 1970. Photo via Đại Kỷ Nguyên.

So when it comes to Christmas in Saigon, maybe us non-Christians should resist its syrupy pull that serves little purpose beyond enticing us to spend money. For those of us who have fond memories of Christmas abroad, let us protect those tender nostalgias without marring them by doomed attempts to recreate them here. But I'm writing this on December 26, anyhow. Christmas is over, so to think of it, perhaps we should turn to a poet, fittingly from America, who recorded the annual taking down of the tree and observed: “all that remains is the scent / of balsam fir. If it’s darkness / we're having, let it be extravagant.”

5 Vietnamese Brands for Christmas Gifts That Celebrate Local Creativity and Culture

2025-12-16T14:00:00+07:00

Even though Christmas is arguably the most important holiday of the year in the west, it is not a traditional special occasion in Vietnam, at least not in the same way Vietnamese go gaga over Tết.

Catholic communities in Saigon and elsewhere in Vietnam observe this holiday the religious way: praying, attending mass, and, for families with a dramatic flair, creating elaborate nativity scenes to display at home. The rest of Vietnam, however, celebrates Christmas with a mix of western and local customs that mostly center around pretty decorations and gift-giving.

Vietnam considers the evening of December 24 to be the height of Christmas celebration, as it is not officially recognized as a national holiday and everybody goes to work as normal on December 25. Gift exchange often takes place in the same evening, though it is not strictly practiced.

In case you’re still in search of ideas for a little something for a close friend, treasured family member, or even crush, Saigoneer has put together this small gift guide to make the brainstorming a little easier. It is no secret that at Saigoneer, we appreciate local creativity and craftsmanship, which are well-represented in the five brands and items below — each from a prominent category of gifts for the diverse receivers in your life.

1. Fashion & Textile: Easy Bad Work

Khim Đặng in his home studio. Photo by Cao Nhân.

Designer Khim Đặng started Easy Bad Work originally at the insistence of his friends to put his artworks on T-shirts. Khim’s art is detailed, fiercely colored, and takes a lot of inspiration from Vietnamese nature and culture, especially mythical motifs like tigers, phoenixes, and dragons. Specialized in shirts, bandanas, and caps, the brand produces limited small batches that are gone once sold out, so each design is a reflection of the time it was born. While the shirts and caps are generally more accessible, it’s the bandanas that truly showcase Easy Bad Work’s artistry through their intricate strokes and symmetrical visuals that draw you in.

Easybadwork products at LÔCÔ Art Market (right) and Khim Đặng's show “Thả Hổ Về Trời” (left).

Read Saigoneer’s profile of Khim Đặng and Easy Bad Work here.

Contact:

Website: easybadwork.com
Instagram: @easybadwork

2. Home Goods: Nắng Ceramics

Photos via Facebook page Nắng Ceramics.

If your giftee is anything like me, who believes that meals eaten on beautiful crockery taste better, they would probably enjoy a choice item or two from Nắng Ceramics. While it’s a relatively young brand, the design philosophy Nắng pursues is closely in line with Lái Thiêu ceramics, a time-honored style originating from Bình Dương. The hand-painted patterns are recognizable enough to not veer too much into minimalism, but are also not too ostentatious to distract you from the beauty of your food. Gladiolus, carp, chrysanthemum, rooster, etc. — the motifs are charmingly rustic, rendered in an elegantly muted palette. I personally own a deep plate and a medium bowl from Nắng Ceramics, and they’re my favorites to create rice bowls in.

Contact:

Instagram: @nang.ceramic

3. Food & Beverages: Sông Cái Distillery

Photos via Sông Cái Distillery.

Rice wine has tugged on the heartstrings of Vietnamese drinkers for centuries, at times, quite literally. We love gulping down rượu đế to nhậu, but few ever pay too much attention to what went into the making of the drink. Hanoi-based Sông Cái Distillery was founded as an attempt to pay respect to the land and the wonderful produce it has bestowed on us. Their spirits and wines are born of a close relationship with indigenous farmers and species, like sim berries in the Spiced Roselle Gin and Mẩy, an amaro bitters made in collaboration with a partner from the Red Dao ethnic minority. While Sông Cái might not appeal to giftees usually enamored by name brands, their locally made bottles could intrigue drinkers with an open mind who are eager to try out new flavors.

Contact:

Website: songcaidistillery.com
Instagram: @songcaidistillery

4. Books: Chu Du Hà Nội by Lê Rin

Images via Thái Hà Books.

Graphic designer and illustrator Lê Rin rose to fame for the first time nearly a decade ago when he published his artbook Việt Nam Miền Ngon, a passion project comprising 100 hand-drawn illustrations of traditional dishes across Vietnam. Since then, it has been reprinted 11 times and remains a popular title for anyone who loves both gorgeous illustrations and eating. Chu Du Hà Nội is the latest title in Lê Rin’s growing portfolio, and this time, he takes readers on a visual journey to the capital. Part travelogue, part artbook, and part cultural exploration — the artbook lends Lê Rin’s intricate watercolor art style with the sights, scenes, and snacks of Hanoi. Buying books as gifts is always a tricky move, as readers tend to have very specific tastes and non-readers might leave the gift forever unread. This artbook is accessible enough to appeal to both.

Where to get: Bookstores across Vietnam or via the publisher’s website here.

5. Arts & Design: Tò He

Photo via Tò He homepage.

Photos via Tò He homepage.

In a market filled with colorful, vibrant merchandise, Tò He’s products stand out thanks to their humorous, charmingly childlike designs and a meaningful brand vision. Founded in 2006, Tò He is a social enterprise with a mission to help improve the livelihood of disadvantaged children in Vietnam through creativity. They organize free art classes, craft workshops, and vocational training programs for children, whose artworks are digitized and polished by designers to become commercial products for sales. A portion of the revenue is returned to the children as royalties. Tò He’s range of products is eclectic, so finding something for an artistic loved one in your life won’t be difficult.

Contact:

Website: tohe.vn
Online store: here