Open Kitchen 003 - Other Tongue
Open Kitchen 002 - Fusion
Open Kitchen 001 - Assembly
Other Curatorial Projects
Working Conditions
I Want to Know, I Need to Know
Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw
Internet Archaeology
Split Level
The Duet’s Carnival
Tone Check: The Skins of Korean Contemporary Painting
At-Will Adaptation: The Exhibition, A Residency-then-Exhibition
At-Will Adaptation: The Residency, A Residency-then-Exhibition
(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography
Alienation ?
TRACES
Vu Duc Toan: Performing End Credits
Hafsa Nouman: Facsimile
Assimilational Antagonism: The third place bites back
Hans Haacke’s showing of an old work at Maxwell Graham
Stephanie Creaghan: The Crumbs of Our Time
Bui Thanh Tam: Outside In
Jenny Jisun Kim: Verses on Oxherding
A New Topology in Chinese and Vietnamese Contemporary Photography
Hot Coffee conversation, Anh Nguyen, Felisa Nguyen, and Huyen Tran
A Mirrored Interview
The Estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley at CHART Gallery asks if we still want to play
Hyeejin Bae: Eye Candy
Nomad Photography
queerness, chinese, contemporary, photography, (in)directions
Cynthia Gutiérrez at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Wu Chi-Tsung solo exhibition at Katina Museum of Art
Xiong Wei: Becoming the Masses Amongst Elites
What has to be NFT’d?
Jean-Luc Moulène Solo Exhibition at Miguel Aubrey Gallery
Yoan Capote Solo Exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery
Take a Step: Phil Zheng Cai on the Opening of M+ Museum
An edited verison of this piece of writing was published in Art Nation Vietnam Issue #11 alongside its Vietnamese translation.
Vu Duc Toan - Performing end credits
In going to see a contemporary art performance, the audience is in fact expecting TV, on-site and live. They are there to see the action unfolding in real time, until Vu Duc Toan decides to sit and tell stories of actions that happened elsewhere. Curator–philosopher Thomas Zummer discussed how the boundaries of thinking, acting, techné, and artifact dissolve into mediations, leading to the collapse of mediums and confusion of realities. Under these circumstances, elevated senses set the new baseline for experiences. A performance is expected to show as a performance. However, Vu Duc Toan’s “Cigarette Ashes in the Neilma Theater” is anything but a Hollywood production. It is domestic, spontaneous, unpretentious, unchoreographed, approximate, and worldly.
“On the attic floor of the shop, almost every night, the sound of the young daughter practicing the piano could be heard well into the late hours. Occasionally, her father’s stern voice would break through the music. Downstairs, as had become customary, the neighborhood children gathered to listen. The wife was not beautiful, but to the children she was like a fairy. Whenever she opened her hand, there were free candies and sunflower seeds. The children would sometimes scatter and run away whenever they saw the husband descending from the attic.”
The anxiety of expecting theater is bilateral. Like the spectators, the performer usually comes to an anxious state if the next wow moment isn’t imminent. The whole set is often designed according to the anticipated emotions. Long-lasting silences are only legitimized by the ultimate climax. Anticipation is maneuvered to drive an emotional roller coaster which is the definition of a good performance. Vu Duc Toan’s practice is the antithesis of theater logic. His intention is not to direct emotion, but to tell people true stories in a setting that is most comfortable to him and him only.
Unlike contemporary art’s common gesture of ascending and transcending, Vu Duc Toan’s performance actually descends, metaphorically and quite literally. Both sentences and action are pronounced and carried out in entirety with fillers that would have been edited out in any other theatrical works. At one point he laid down on the floor comfortably as if the institutional site was his living room, unconcerned about the fact that he was running almost an hour behind his scheduled ending time. The anxiety of an artist also lies in an urge to establish him/herself as an artist, a group of human beings who derive a little more from the mundane activities. They abstract, summarize, extrapolate, and contradict, resulting in works that often resemble a compressed ball of lived experiences and concepts. But rarely do we notice what is lost in the process: how lives are actually lived, and how things are actually spelled out. This is precisely what Vu Duc Toan is after.
“On her first day at the museum, she was astonished to find millions of sunflower seeds on display. They were all handmade ceramic pieces from the Mainland. The exhibition was so strange, so incomprehensible to her, that despite not fully understanding what she was witnessing, she suddenly burst into tears.”
Vu Duc Toan’s gestures are fragmented, not as a representation of our newly acquainted short reels’ universe, but as a representation of how our memories work, and how most stories are actually told. He argues that obtaining information second-hand is nothing to be ashamed of—it is the most fundamental but overlooked epistemology. Even with fabrication and exaggeration, told stories are as essential to our lives as events experienced. By giving the authority of annotation to someone else (the storyteller), we are able to curb the directorship in us and to empathize with events experienced by others. Vu Duc Toan, representing those who often don’t have the choice of treating art as an abstracted luxury, reminds me that fragmented recollections are our most reliable medium.
“She sensed that someone seemed to be trailing behind her and turned around abruptly. It turned out to be a girl selling candy, who also had East Asian roots like hers. Finding her quite likeable at first glance, Mrs. Đỗ took out a few coins and bought a candy bar. But the girl didn’t want the money. She pointed to the flyer Mrs. Đỗ was holding, which had the portrait of a stout, bearded man printed on it. She was willing to trade the candy for it.”
When the perception of a country is one-dimensional (Vietnam—War), stories are only told when they cater to the preconception. But when the spotlights turn on for the indigenous, how do they actually respond? Vu starts subordinately, THROUGH something. The dent made by biting down on an Ai Weiwei porcelain sunflower seed is far more real and bloody than the art itself. Even having the performance fully translated by an interpreter is as honest as a story in plain text format rolling up a projection. We are so obsessed with the storylines in art without noticing that curated storytelling is only the B-rows of the real thing, and the truest stories sometimes can only be told through an intermediary.
The performance happened in New York, where people are fascinated with collaging, whether it’s in art or in life. The melting pot of a world gains its reputation from how materials overlap. People come and mingle when stories intersect; languages are spoken in hundreds of dialects, echoing over one another. American collaging is highlighted by how much is layered and pasted over. But what if no elements intersect and overlap? Is it still a collage? Vu Duc Toan answers yes. He places his collaging elements as far apart as they are still relevant, calmly laying out what he wants to say one by one right in front of our eyes. Instead of creating a rhythm by what overlaps, Vu’s performance collage is motivated by how things are spaced out—a rediscovery of slowness that is untheatrical.
Even though contemporary art tends to select its audience, and artists are subconsciously trained to speak a language that is isolated, the ambiguity of the untranslated becomes a universal language—one that VDT speaks through his practice. He is like a playful museum tour guide you hired off Craigslist, who holds your hand to stop in front of an artwork only to read the wall texts out loud to you. Wearing a Van Gogh sunflower shirt that is fainting in colors, he probably knows over a hundred ways to interpret the art to you in his own language, yet he chooses to read the writings on the exhibition label attached to the wall which you could very well do yourself. But this act demonstrates that not only was art made via a choice of mediums, but the interpretation process too. Being more transparent is a medium that is silent but powerful. With the wall label already being a translation by the curator, our tour guide repeats a piece of information which means different things after each repetition.
“I think it’s fine. I didn’t have to pay compensation.And anyway, that job—and everything in that museum will always stay inside my heart. On my last day, I secretly buried one real sunflower seed among those millions of special seeds.”
Instead of treating them as unmovable relics in museums, Vu Duc Toan welcomes “art masters” (Ai Weiwei, Van Gogh) as lived experiences shared by all the people except for the museum elites. When the term “diasporic” is used in contemporary art, it almost always refers to the condition of lives, but in Vu’s cases, the interpretation of an artwork may also be “diasporic”: the underprivileged that had to experience the art could interpret the piece with an intention furthest from the artist’s expectation, yet it still completes the meanings a piece of art ought to include, and sometimes passively.
Many of Vu Duc Toan’s props are undeniably make-shift, from a silver heat-retention blanket, packs of candies being vended, to a microwave and bags of popcorn—once again an anti-Hollywood production. But accessibility is the mundaneness even the most realistic sitcoms cannot imitate. We begin life unfiltered, and the objects and tools that are most handy to us are usually unpolished and weren’t built for the purpose we urgently use them for. Going unscripted is one of the hardest things for a television producer to allow. And it is becoming increasingly difficult for us on a daily basis when everyone curates a life to present for various purposes. For Vu, what is readily at hand is usually the condition of his life and work, because working around is sometimes part of the work.
“Mrs. Đỗ:
-Did they keep the broken seed?
The Girl:
-No. I kept the fragments. And I sent them home to my father, back in my hometown.”
By the end of the performance, Vu Duc Toan had convinced me that the respect for the means of stories are accessed might be the antidote to the 2020s problem of wanting to be doing everything everywhere all at once. Walking out of the performance, a friend bravely admitted to me that he zoned out during the process. But Vu most likely wouldn’t mind that at all, because zoning out may be exactly what he is zooming in on. By rendering himself more transparent than most artists, he enables us to perceive more clearly both the stories told and our perception of contemporary art and ourselves. When the show is over and everyone is expecting the end credits as a cue to leave, I realized that Vu Duc Toan’s whole performance is itself the end credits, in its living and fully extended entirety.
*Bolded texts were directly derived from the script of the performance
“Cigarette Ashes in the Neilma Theater” was a Vu Duc Toan performance in collaboration with Anh Vo and Do Tuong Linh at Performance Space New York, February 5, 2026.