We often encounter adventure tales in books and through adaptations of films or television. But what if a newly imagined adventure tale can also be written as an exhibition — one that maps strange-yet-familiar landscapes with a colonial history of exploration and exploitation?
Organized by Nguyen Art Foundation and curated by Thái Hà, “The year is XXXX” is an exhibition featuring works by Quỳnh Đồng, Nguyễn Phương Linh, Thảo Nguyên Phan and Danh Võ. Taking place at EMASI Nam Long and EMASI Vạn Phúc as two sequences of a curatorial narrative, the exhibition essay was written in the form of an adventure tale that follows a girl’s journey as she navigates different realities each time she wakes and sleeps. The audience steps into this imaginary adventure, through the lens of travel writings by missionaries and explorers in colonial Indochina, where places that we once thought were familiar become almost unrecognizable today.
According to the curatorial text, the exhibition “explores how adventure is used to invent fantastical fictions of foreign lands, but also as a strategy of escape from colonial subjugation.” Every six weeks, EMASI Vạn Phúc venue features rotating curations by different guest curators and guest artists, offering new alternative realities of the evolving curatorial narrative of the exhibition.
Installation view of “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation: EMASI Nam Long (left) and EMASI Vạn Phúc (right).
Upon arrival at EMASI Nam Long, audiences will encounter the first section titled Trùng mù (Endless, sightless), where Nguyễn Phương Linh’s single-channel video ‘Memory of the blind elephant’ (2016) appears under the dim red light, with black rubber mats laid down on the floor for the audience to sit on. Shifting the camera’s point of view between the perspectives of a human, animal, or machine, her work offers different views of the landscape and former colonial rubber plantation in Central Vietnam — a region that has been, and still continues to be, exploited.
The artist retraced the colonial-era travels of bacteriologist and explorer Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), whose writings documented his expedition to the Central Highlands and his introduction of rubber plantations in Indochina. Elephants, culturally significant to daily life in Central Highlands, are believed to be colorblind, and the blindness mentioned here acts as a metaphor for the blindness to the destructive consequences of rapid urbanization and industrialization.
Nguyễn Phương Linh. Memory of the blind elephant, 2016. Single-channel video, color, sound. 00:14:00, loop.
Meanwhile, under the piercing brightness that cuts through our vision in a different room, ‘The Last Ride’ (2017) resembles the deconstructed elephant saddle in a minimalist form, made of industrial materials such as aluminium and steel. Here, the elephant was considered as a commodity, a mode of transportation, and a subject of exploitation that carried the weight of colonial ambition.
Nguyễn Phương Linh. The Last Ride, 2017. Aluminium pieces, plastic perspex, lights, glass and MDF pedestal. Installation dimensions variable.
Thảo Nguyên Phan’s ‘Voyages de Rhodes’ (2014–2017) presents a series of watercolor paintings attached to the wall by a single edge, allowing them to stand outwards in space. The artist painted directly over ancient pages of a 17th-century text by Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660) on his 35 years of travel and missionary work, including in Indochina. At first glance, the images first appear to be from a colorful tropical paradise, with innocent children wearing school uniforms playing together, and their dreamy eyes remain half-opened.
Thảo Nguyên Phan. Voyages de Rhodes, 2014-2017. Watercolor on found book pages. Dimensions variable.
However, upon closer observation, the child's play starts turning into horror scenes: children playing “jump rope” over another child’s lifeless body, disembodied heads stuck on floating drums, a child standing on top of a ladder next to a tree while his head detached, etc. As the line between fiction and reality begins to blur, what appears as a dream of childhood innocence slowly reveals itself as something haunting, while the French text lying underneath remains obscure. This also prompts the question: are these beautifully fluid brushstrokes, yet disturbing images, meant to simply reflect the foreign gaze towards Vietnamese subjects, or to critique the cruelty of colonialism? De Rhodes’ writings resemble some remnants echoing from the past, while Thảo Nguyên Phan’s works unfold like some haunting fictional tales of colonial histories, ones that feel both long forgotten and completely detached from the histories that we were taught and our realities in the present.
Thảo Nguyên Phan. Voyages de Rhodes, 2014-2017. Watercolor on found book pages. Dimensions variable.
Towards the end of the first venue, visitors encounter Nguyễn Phương Linh’s work once again. ‘The Light’ (2018) is made of wooden fragments that appear to float, each carrying the dim lights in a dense fog filling up the room. The fragmented woods were collected from a Catholic church in Northern Vietnam; these physical remains and memories of a sacred place have turned into a new form and narrative. According to the exhibition text, these wooden panels have crossed continents before arriving at this exhibition, which traces “the routes once taken by missionaries whose journeys ended in martyrdom on this land.”
Nguyễn Phương Linh. The Light, 2018. Lights, wood panelling from a Catholic church in Northern Vietnam, smoke, clear perspex. Dimensions variable.
Danh Võ’s ‘2.2.1861’ (2009) stands quietly at the end of a corridor. The work itself is a handwritten letter, repeatedly written by the artist’s father Phụng Võ, several times a week. Despite not being fluent in French, he meticulously copied out the heartfelt farewell letter from Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard (1829–1861), a French catholic martyr, to his own father. The original letter was penned during Vénard’s final days before his execution in Northern Vietnam in 1861, under Emperor Tự Đức’s harsh campaign of anti-Christian persecution. One of the last lines reads: “Father and son will meet again in heaven. I, a small transient being, aim to leave first. Farewell.” The act of copying and repeating words through calligraphy in a language that he was not familiar with had become a form of prayer and a personal expression of commitment between the father and son.
Danh Võ. 2.2.1861, 2009. Handwritten letter by Phụng Võ. 29.85 x 20.96 cm.
Moving on to the exhibition venue at EMASI Vạn Phúc, we enter the next part of the adventure titled Gently Floating Away (Nhẹ nhàng trôi đi), into the utopia of hyper-real video works by Quỳnh Đồng. The artist borrowed from the art of painters trained from the l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (Indochina School of Fine Arts), and projected them onto large-scale moving images. The lotus is often regarded as Vietnam’s national flower and is deeply embedded in folklore and visual culture. However, in ‘Lotus pond’ (2017), the lotuses now appear in oversized and independent entities, standing still under the rain and its soundscape, where time and space have become an infinite loop.
Quỳnh Đồng. Lotus pond, 2017. 3-channel video installation, 1920 x 1080 HD, color, sound. 00:50:00, loop.
Visitors will find themselves immersed in another landscape — this time, beneath the surface of dark water — through ‘Black sea and gold fish’ (2021). The work takes direct reference from Phạm Hậu’s lacquer painting ‘Nine carps in the Water’ (1939), with images and its practice deeply rooted in local tradition, yet formalized through a colonial gaze. In Quỳnh Đồng’s reimagined work, the fish and sea waves are no longer decorative motifs, but are now turned into bodies of Butoh dancers whose strange movements navigate through the darkness. Originating in post-war Japan, Butoh emerged as a rebellion against westernized ideals of performance. Here, the human figure is not considered as ornamental, but as a resistant presence.
Quỳnh Đồng. Black sea and gold fish, 2021. 3-channel video installation, 1920 x 1080 HD, color, sound. 00:08:13, loop.
As this is an evolving exhibition, there are rotating curations by guest curators and guest artists to be revealed every six weeks, until November 2025. Previously, the first one to be featured was Diane Severin Nguyen’s video installation ‘Tyrant Star’ (2019), curated by Bill Nguyễn. The work reflects on the construction of Vietnamese identity across past and present, shifting through the landscapes of the Southwest and Hồ Chí Minh City metropolitan with echoing folk verses (ca dao), the digital realm of a Vietnamese YouTuber singing ‘The Sound of Silence,’ to images of children in an orphanage.
Diane Severin Nguyen. Tyrant Star, 2019. Single-channel video, color, sound. 00:15:00, loop.
Meanwhile, the ongoing curation ‘Letters to the Cadres,’ curated by Joud Al-Tamimi, features photography works by Võ An Khánh, paintings by Trương Công Tùng, and installation by Tuấn Mami. Under the purple light, the space evokes an imagined “laboratory” — where soil, substances from a defunct military pharmaceutical factory, cactus, tree saps, micro-organisms, and human bodies converge. Here, the land bears witness to everyday resistance and war remnants, holding within it memories and unfinished stories shaped by colonial legacies and the enduring presence of the dead.
Installation view of “Letters to the Cadres” in “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation.
When one reads the exhibition title, perhaps the first questions that come to mind are “What year was XXXX?” and “What exactly happened?”. The unrevealed year might seem ambiguous, yet it opens up multiple possibilities of historical events and fictional stories that extend beyond the constraints of a certain chronological order. The exhibition text is presented in different paper stacks placed on the floor, which includes a timeline of Vietnamese history spanning from the year of 1640 to 1925, marking significant events from the imperial to colonial periods, many of which are reflected in the works on view.
Installation view of “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation.
Two parallel exhibition spaces: one is elusive, mysterious, and filled with ghostly presence; the other is where creatures are immediately present and ready to overwhelm and prey on any traveler who enters. Within realms that we once believed to be familiar, a deep sense of unfamiliarity emerges. Through language barriers, the distance between the past events and present-day realities, between the colonial gaze and cultural memory arrives. Histories that once seemed close now appear strange, distant and somehow forgotten in a newly imagined form of an adventure tale.
Photos courtesy of Nguyen Art Foundation.
“The year is XXXX” is now on view until November 2025 at Nguyen Art Foundation’s two venues EMASI Van Phuc and EMASI Nam Long. More information about the exhibition, opening hours and public programs can be found on the website.
