The eighth Engaging With Vietnam conference, held in Honolulu in October 2016, focused on the theme of “Engaging With Vietnam through Scholarship and the Arts.”
Our inspiration for that conference came from our realization that many people in the arts world in Vietnam are asking a lot of the same questions that academics ask, and are doing so in very sophisticated ways. We therefore wished to highlight this intersection between the arts and scholarship.
In preparation for the conference, Engaging With Vietnam conference founder Phan Lê Hà and I met in the summer of 2016 with Nguyễn Quốc Thành and Trương Quế Chi, two artists and curators from Nhà Sàn Collective, an art space in Hanoi.
Our conversation went on for well over an hour and it covered numerous topics, from discussing some of Nhà Sàn Collective’s projects to highly philosophical discussions about the contradictions between activism and the arts, and the difficulty over overcoming the limitations of discourse.
Unfortunately, I have not had the time to subtitle the videos of our conversation, but for readers who understand Vietnamese I think the following videos should prove to be intellectually stimulating.
Thank you Nguyễn Quốc Thành and Trương Quế Chi for taking the time to talk with us!!!
Part 1:
Part 2:
