Through a collaboration with KIRTI - a counter-archive dedicated to documenting contemporary artistic practices beyond established institutions and centers of power - Digitizing Việt Nam is pleased to present a collection of interviews and artworks by seven contemporary Vietnamese visual artists. The collection offers not only a snapshot of Vietnam’s artistic landscape today, but also a rare opportunity to encounter artists in dialogue with their own work—to witness how ideas are conceived, tested, developed, and gradually take shape through artistic reflection and practice.

The collection brings together artists whose work engages with questions of identity, memory, urbanization, spirituality, marginality, and social transformation. Dũng Quốc Nguyễn (1983–) presents intimate yet challenging portraits of transgender communities, migrant laborers, and others living on the margins of Vietnamese society. Through bodies and faces often obscured from public view, his paintings question dominant norms of beauty, respectability, and visibility.

Phương Đức (1982–) draws inspiration from folk art and vernacular visual culture, creating paintings and sculptures that combine contemporary artistic language with organic materials, including pigments made from earth and natural substances. His work evokes connections between cultural memory, the environment, and everyday life.

Through photography, Mai Nguyên Anh (1992–) documents people and social realities that are often overlooked. His series, The Story of B, recounts the life of a Vietnamese sex worker through a visual language that is both intimate and deeply reflective. Meanwhile, Yến Dương (1991–) creates layered collages that combine archival imagery with contemporary landscapes, exploring the lingering traces of war, collective memory, and historical forgetting in present-day Vietnam.

The collection also includes reflections by the late Đỉnh Q. Lê (1968–2024), one of the most influential Vietnamese artists on the international stage. Known for his woven photographic works and multimedia installations, Đỉnh Q. Lê speaks about his return to Vietnam, his engagement with history and memory, and his passion for collecting Vietnamese ceramics and antiquities.

Đạt Vũ (1991–) presents images from A Thousand Fish Turn Into Guan Yin, a poetic photographic series inspired by transformation, fluid identities, and his experience of growing up at the intersection of Catholicism and Buddhism. Meanwhile, Duy-Phương Lê Nguyễn (1984–) contributes Mirages (2017–2022), a long-term project documenting idealized visions of urban futures displayed on construction-site billboards across Vietnam. By re-photographing and reframing these images, he exposes the contradictions between aspirations for development, globalization, and the realities of contemporary urbanization.

For Digitizing Việt Nam, this collection represents a broader understanding of what a digital archive can be. Alongside historical texts, newspapers, manuscripts, and archival photographs, we believe there is an ongoing need to document and preserve the living cultural landscapes of the present—and especially the voices of the artists who are helping to shape them.

Our sincere thanks to KIRTI, initiated in 2018 by Hunter P. Deerfield, for sharing this collection with us. 

👉 View the collection here.