Vietnam Art Collection (VAC) is thrilled to announce its new location in Shanghai opened on December 7, 2024. This marks VAC’s first expansion from its Hanoi home to fulfill our long-term vision of supporting artists in production, exhibition, and network opportunities on a global stage. Following Shanghai, VAC will roll out a series of programs in Seoul, New York, and Toronto thanks to the generous support from the VAC Circle, including artists, art enthusiasts, collectors, seasoned professionals, philanthropists, and communities in arts, culture, academia, business, and governmental sectors. With such joined forces, we hope to build a healthy, embracing, and supportive ecosystem where we all can contribute and thrive. VAC Shanghai will organize seasonal exhibitions, educational programs, and short-term residency to enhance the visibility of artists of Vietnamese descent and facilitate cross-cultural dialogues and connections across regions. 

Since its inception in 2021, VAC has centered its mission around mapping out the genealogies of Vietnamese modern and contemporary arts through research-driven initiatives and artist support programs. We aim to build a collaborative platform for artists, cultural practitioners, creatives, and organizations with varied backgrounds to connect and forge long-term relations. By reflecting on the mode of knowledge and cultural production while facilitating conversations across fields and regions, we seek to bridge research and practice and make contemporary arts from Vietnam and beyond more accessible to the broader audience. 

Over the past two decades, cross-regional dialogues about the Vietnamese modern and contemporary arts have always been under the umbrella of post-colonial and Southeast Asian studies. Yet, if we trace Vietnamese histories and cultural formations, worth closer examination are similarities, parallels, and intersections with East Asia, not to mention the ongoing debates around the integrity and origin of Vietnamese culture despite the colonial past and regional interactions. 

Along our field research journey starting from 2023, we encounter artists, writers, and creatives who adopt locally grounded cosmological approaches to arts that spring from their personal belief in and connection with life, family, poetry, and history, which are deeply rooted in the specificity of their immediate environments. This exhibition marks the beginning chapter of a series of programs highlighting the proliferation and nuances of visual languages, historical narratives, cultural practices, and lived experiences that shape today's Vietnamese art scene. 

VAC Shanghai will debut with a group exhibition, A Beginning: Launching VAC Shanghai, featuring the most recent works of emerging artists from Vietnam and beyond, including KV Duong, Lam Na, Mr.Bambii, Ha Ninh Pham, Mai Ta, Trinh Cam Nhi, and Vo Huynh Phu. It is the first time participating artists will showcase their works in Shanghai. We will also launch a research-based project,  tradasociety, led by VAC’s founding member and researcher Nguyen Thuy Anh, that investigates cultural forms through literature, visual arts, culinary arts, fashion & design, and digital media empowered by artificial intelligence. 

Works on view include a series of collaborative works by Trinh Cam Nhi & Ha Ninh Pham and Mai Ta & Mr.Bambii, both stemming from their longtime friendships and realized during their residencies at VAC Hanoi. While Cam Nhi and Ha Ninh’s work, Hanoi.06.2024, explores painting as a language over a month of drawing conversation using symbolic forms that are distinctively their own, the works of Mai and Mr.Bambii challenge each other by combining their practices into one—morphing Mai’s paintings into wax sculpture. 

KV Duong, a Vietnamese descendant with Chinese heritage based in London, presents his current practice of using latex as a painting’s base, employing imagery from family archives, and questioning what it means to be queer. Vo Huyn Phu, a self-taught artist based in Saigon, makes flamboyant, exquisite paintings inspired by ancient Vietnamese garments and folk tales. Lam Na, who grew up playing with Vietnamese artifacts dating back to 3000 B.C., explores the materiality of terracotta and views her practice as building ancient houses that can function as a channel between the past and the future. 

Tradasociety takes its name from a type of social behavior in Vietnam, where locals prefer to hang out and chit-chat at street vendors selling trà đá, meaning iced tea in Vietnamese. This is also typically where fruitful conversations between artists, writers, and others take place. Throughout the exhibition, tradasociety will encourage each visitor to participate in a survey based on researcher Nguyen Thuy Anh’s recent experiment to translate literature into culinary experiences. Following the survey, we will offer each participant an herb-based drink made of Vietnamese ingredients and inspired by The Luminous Moon, a 20th-century Vietnamese literary masterpiece by Nam Cao, who is often referred to as the Vietnamese Lu Xun and known for his critical portrayal of Vietnamese society during the 1930s and the 1940s. 

About the location

In Shanghai’s Baoshan district, home to multiple industrial heritages that witnessed the city’s transformation since the mid-twentieth century, VAC Shanghai is situated inside the Zhongcheng Valley, a one-hundred-thousand-square-meter industrial site initially built in 1876 by the British as a rail yard. The Valley got its name from its historical past - in 1959, the state established Zhongcheng Warehouses to store hundreds of tons of industrial supplies, such as cement, before they got shipped across the global South, covering Asia, South America, and Africa. As urban development took place in Shanghai starting in the early 2000s, the Valley was finally remodeled into a creative industry cluster in 2013, the city’s most significant industrial heritage reconstruction project to date. Now, it is home to a vibrant creative community encompassing art, design, automobile, and technology.