Dispatch

Dispatch comes to you this week from both sides of the United States with Rirkrit Tiravanija in New York and our host and partner Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran in California. The two enjoy a relaxed but contemplative conversation asking questions that Arlette finds she’s never had the opportunity to ask before as every other time the pair meets they tend to talk more about daily life and the food they share.

Instead, this talk focuses on the musings and reflections attitudes on life, on the pace of art practitioners in the world in recent times that has suddenly both slowed down and changed radically. Finally, the pair discuss Rirkrit’s path to teaching, something he’s been doing for decades but is rarely talked about or noted upon.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favor of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object, and instead focus on use value and the bringing of people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija’s work challenges expectations around labour and virtuosity. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. He also helped establish an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located near Chiang Mai, Thailand.

For the third episode of Dispatch season two, XTer Asia, partner and host Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran meets up in person with this week's guests. Young Chung and Kibum Kim are two important figures in the Los Angeles’ multicultural art scene from the Commonwealth and Council gallery. 

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Southern California. The three speakers sit in the gallery’s bright office and enjoy some homemade cookies baked by Kibum. The duo begins to talk about their alternative, and to some extent, subversive approaches of running the gallery, how to maintain their experimentation, belief and ethos in the severity of the art market, the matter of representation in art, and what it means to truly care in the relationships formed between gallerists and their artists. 

Today for the second episode of XTer Asia season, Dispatch is going to talk to Barcelona-based art patron Han Nefkens. Despite having a lot of mutual friends through our cross-continent network, this is the first time our host Arlette meets Han. 

The conversation will anchor to Han Nefkens’ close engagement with Asia at large. We start from the new initiative of Han Nefken's foundation with major institutions across Asia, to Han’s very first activities in the continent at the AIDS-awareness event in Bangkok, and the idea of collecting without artwork possession. 

Han Nefkens is a writer, art collector, and patron of the arts. His collection of contemporary art consists of photographs, videos, installations, and paintings by Jeff Wall, Roni Horn, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others...

We inaugurate this season with X Zhu-Nowell, an Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Our host and partner Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran is in Saigon and reaches out to X in New York through a virtual screen, but the warm and honest conversation brings the two close despite the geographic gap. 

Join us as we embark with X on a discussion filled with inquiries about the power of naming and being named, along with the assistant curator’s perspectives on power. From sensorial architecture in exhibition making, to that of the particularity of identity and work title in being an art curator in American institutions. 

In this episode, host and Dispatch partner Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran meets with two Việt Kiều art practitioners working in Germany, artist Sung Tieu and curator Tuan Do Duc. The conversation begins with Sung’s most recent solo exhibition ‘Multiboy’ curated by Tuan at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, a foundation based in Leipzig, also known as GfZK. As per usual, Arlette meets with guests at a distance, tuning in with Sung at her studio in Berlin and Tuan from his museum in Leipzig.

The three begin by discussing the solo exhibition ‘Multiboy’ as a project between the artist and curator before expanding into the narrative of being Vietnamese immigrants in a post-socialist European context. From personal experiences of acquiring legal status to dissecting its bureaucracy and political identity, these guests skillfully describe their processes of intellectualizing and empathizing with these larger topics through art and the creation of exhibitions. 

Today’s episode takes us back to the early 20th century in Vietnam. Curator Phoebe Scott leads listeners into the Golden Age of the first group of students at the École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine. Through their challenges and achievements in the context of the colonized country; and their journey seeking their artistic voice in Europe as Asian diaspora artists.

Phoebe Scott is a curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where she curated the exhibition Radiant Material: A Dialogue in Vietnamese Lacquer Painting (2017) and co-curated Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016), in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. Phoebe was also a co-curator of the one of the inaugural exhibitions of National Gallery Singapore, Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015). 

Prior to joining the National Gallery, Phoebe completed her Ph.D. on the subject of modern Vietnamese art, and she has written a number of texts on the subject. She is currently developing her research into a monograph on artists of the École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine. Phoebe is also an adjunct lecturer in art history at the National University of Singapore.

In this episode of Dispatch, host Arlette Quyn-Anh Tran speaks with gallerist Quynh Pham. If there were no lockdown in Saigon, this interview may have taken place in her office at Galerie Quynh. Galerie Quynh is currently hosting a duo show with our previous guest, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and his collaborator Wowy. The gallery is also anticipating the upcoming Dogma Art prize exhibition, initiated by another previous guest at Dispatch, Dominic Scriven. 

Quynh Pham acts as an important knot in the crisscross of the local art scene, she is one of the key figures shaping the contemporary art scene in Saigon today. Arlette sits down with her virtually to talk about Pham’s vision for art, from the very beginning of her arrival in the mid-1990s until now. The two discuss topics like the shift and mix of the art ecosystem and the meaning of time in the collection of art. 

Quynh Pham is Owner and Director of Galerie Quynh, she has spent two decades promoting contemporary art practice in Vietnam through exhibitions, publications, talks, lectures, and collaborations with local and international cultural organizations. 

Today, Dispatch meets with art historian and professor Pamela Nguyen Corey who has come to visit with host Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran at her home. Listen to this week's episode as the two sit down in Saigon for a relaxed chat.  

This week, speaker Dr. Pamela Corey will talk about how the knowledge of Vietnamese art history is produced, its research as well as its pedagogy in institutions of higher education throughout many different continents, including Northern America, Europe, and Asia. The two will also discuss Pamela’s newest book and how geographic representation has been shifted in art interpretation and appreciation. 

Pamela Nguyen Corey is an art historian that researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts.

Today Dispatch meets artist, curator, and queer activist Nguyen Quoc Thanh, one of the core members of Nhà Sàn Collective. Virtually, host Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran sits down with him in Hanoi where he sits upstairs, above a dinner with some of his artist friends. 

In this episode, Dispatch digs up parts of the Nhà Sàn Collective’s history related to queer activities. Dispatch and Thanh will also talk about the meaning of ‘being independent’ in Vietnamese artistic context, about conflicting situations in working collectively, the aesthetics of intimacy and queerness, and the freedom to express it in art.

Today Dispatch meets one of the earliest Post Doi Moi era investors in Vietnam - Dominic Scriven. Scriven has also been involved in other lesser-known streams of art and culture in Vietnam. In this episode, Dispatch host, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran chats with him about his first arrival in Vietnam at the beginning of 1990s, how he started to engage with Vietnam, first through the language and then through the rapid changes of the country for nearly three decades. Scriven's local involvement has expanded into a wide range of activities, from the establishment of the new free-market economic structure to the collection of literature and propaganda posters, from wildlife conservation to contemporary art.