Acts of Becoming: Vietnam’s 1990s Avant-Garde on Film

In advance of We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers at Performance Space New York (January–February 2026)—a residency bringing together artists from Vietnam to create new performance works—curator, art historian, and researcher Đỗ Tường Linh presents a special screening and discussion tracing the early history of performance and experimental art in Vietnam on Sunday, November 16 at 4pm.

Following the screening, Đỗ will be joined by Lumi Tan, Anh Vo, and maura nguyễn donohue for a conversation situating these early gestures of defiance within the broader trajectory of contemporary performance art in Vietnam—bridging historical acts of self-determination and today’s strategies of visibility.

The program features two landmark video documents: Riencarnation (2000, dir. Nicholas Brooks), a short documentary on Vũ Dân Tân, and a selection of performances by Trương Tân, filmed by artist and curator Veronika Radulovic. Together, these works illuminate the emergence of performativity and artistic autonomy in the Vietnamese avant-garde of the 1990s—an era often regarded as the dawn of Vietnamese contemporary art, when the country was just opening to the world after the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986.

A self-taught artist and co-founder of Salon Natasha, Hanoi’s first independent art space, Vũ Dân Tân (1946–2009) was a central figure in shaping this spirit of experimentation. Riencarnation captures his improvisational and playful approach to artmaking—transforming discarded materials into poetic assemblages that speak to freedom, imagination, and renewal amid social transition.

Trương Tân (b. 1963), a painter and performer known for his fearless engagement with questions of identity, gender, and dissent, emerged from the same period as a radical voice of self-expression. The videos of his performances—documented by Radulovic in the 1990s—remain rare and vital records of this formative moment, revealing his use of the body as both subject and site of resistance.

Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the curator for the 2026 Converge 45 citywide exhibition in Portland, Oregon, and a curator for Focus at Frieze New York. From 2010 to 2022, she was senior curator at The Kitchen in New York where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was guest curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at MoMA PS1. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, numerous exhibition catalogs and university publications. She was the recipient of a 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been visiting faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and the Yale School of Art.

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez's unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evans's speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).

maura nguyễn donohue is Chair of Dance and Director of the MFA in Dance at Hunter College and has been making work and facilitating, curating, producing, and leading public conversations in the US, Asia, and Europe for over 30 years. From 1999-2004, as artistic advisor for Dance Theater Workshop’s Mekong Project, maura facilitated residencies for AAPI and Southeast Asian artists in the US, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Most recently, maura was one of twelve choreographers included in Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, co-edited by thomas f. defrantz and Annie-B Parson. maura publishes through commissions from arts organizations such as MANCC, Danspace Project, DanceNYC and Gibney Dance, in academic presses such as Scholar & Feminist Online, Dance Studies Association, and Women and Performance, as well as at Culturebot. Ambivalent Selves: The Asian Female Body in American Concert Dance was published in Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance and excerpts of When You’re Old Enough were in the original (1998) and the 25th anniversary (2023) edition of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose.

Đỗ Tường Linh is a curator, art researcher, and writer based between Hanoi and New York City. She holds a BA in Art History and Theoretical Criticism from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa from SOAS, University of London, supported by the prestigious Alphawood Scholarship. In 2025, she completed an MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Linh was part of the curatorial team of the 12th Berlin Biennial and is currently the Artistic Director of VCCA (Hanoi, Vietnam) and Director of Nguyen Wahed Gallery (New York and London). Linh is co-founder and member of Lunch Hour—a New York based artist/curator collective exploring and critiquing the mythologies around authorship, work, and labor. Since 2005, Linh has curated and contributed to exhibitions and projects across Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. She was a research fellow with Site and Space in Southeast Asia (Power Institute, University of Sydney, funded by the Getty Foundation) and has participated in international programs including Le 18 Curatorial Residency (2024), Asia Cultural Council Research Fellowship (2023), Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial (2019), Mekong Cultural Hub (2018–19), CIMAM Museum Workshop (2018), and Tate Intensive (2018). Her curatorial projects include Means of Production (New York, 2024), Revived Photo Hanoi (Hanoi, 2023), Citizen Earth (Hanoi, 2020), The Foliage 3 (VCCA, Hanoi, 2019), Geo-Resilience of the All-World (La Colonie, Paris, 2018), No War, No Vietnam (Galerie Nord, Berlin, 2018), and SEAcurrents (London, 2017).