Art Labor including Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung & Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran is an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City, who work in between visual arts, social and life sciences in various public contexts and locales. We do not produce single artwork but develop many-year-long journey during which one inspiration is a seed to cultivate. The seed grows – the inspiration expands and bears into rhizome of projects and artworks.
Their previous journeys include Unconditional Belief (2012-2015), Jrai Dew (2016-ongoing) and JUA (2019-ongoing)
They have been exhibited widely in Vietnam and international, notably such as Paradise Kortrijk, Triennial for contemporary art, Belgium (2021);Carnegie International 57th, Bangkok Art Biennale, ‘A beast, a god, and a line’ at Dhaka Art Summit, Para Site and Modern Art in Warsaw (2018); Cosmopolis #1: Collective Intelligence at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan; ‘Salt of the Jungle’ at KF Gallery, Korea, (2017); Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden in Central Highlands of Vietnam (2016-17); The Adventure of Color Wheel at Pediatrics Department, Eye Hospital HCMC (2015); Unconditional Belief at Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2014).
Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, art laborer
Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran is an art laborer based in Saigon. She makes art collectively and individually; curates and writes for various local and international publications, exhibitions, and projects. Her artworks blend politics and sci-fi aesthetics through the assemblages of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. She creates a non-linear and absurd reading of modern histories that question the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World.
She studied art and theories at Freie Universität Berlin, Univerzita Karlova in Prague, and California Institute of the Arts with a Fulbright scholarship. She was a fellow of Art in Networks: GDR and its Global Relations Fellowship, Institut für Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft, TU Dresden, Germany; and the 2022 Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellow at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco.
Arlette is currently the Curator and Director of Post Vidai (since 2016) – a significant collection of Vietnamese contemporary art based in Geneva and Saigon. Previously she was Assistant Curator at Sàn Art (2013 – 2015) and Assistant Curator at Saigon Open City (2006). She has contributed her research and writing to the 58th Carnegie International (2022); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Istanbul Biennale (2015); Hugo Boss Asia Award (2015); 2084 (2012) with Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle; ‘Digitizing the Archival Materials of Blue Space Contemporary Arts Centre,’ for the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; 1st World Biennale Forum, Gwangju, Korea; Synapse – International Curator Network, HKW, Berlin; and solo shows for several emerging artists.
Thao Nguyen Phan, artist
Thao Nguyen Phan ( Phan Thảo Nguyên)
Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Trained as a painter, Phan is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses video, painting and installation. Drawing from literature, philosophy and daily life, Phan observes ambiguous issues in social conventions and history. She started working in film when she began her MFA in Chicago. Phan exhibits internationally, with solo and group exhibitions including Venice Art Biennial (Venice, Italy, 2022); Tate St Ives, (Cornwall, UK, 2022); Chisenhale gallery (London, 2020); WIELS (Brussels, 2020); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2019); Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019); Gemäldegalerie (Berlin, 2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2018); Factory Contemporary Art Centre (Ho Chi Minh City, 2017); Nha San Collective (Hanoi, 2017); and Bétonsalon (Paris, 2016), among others.
She was shortlisted for the 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and she was granted the Han Nefkens Foundation-LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2018, in collaboration with Fundaciò Joan Miró. In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is co-founder of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the local community. Thao Nguyen Phan is expanding her “theatrical fields”, including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. Phan is a 2016-2017 Rolex Protégée, mentored by internationally acclaimed, New York-based, performance and video artist, Joan Jonas.
Truong Cong Tung, artist
Truong Cong Tung grew up in Dak Lak among various ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands, Vietnam. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology and philosophy and the environment, he works with a range of media, including video, installation, painting and found objects, which reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernization, as embodied in the morphing ecology, belief or mythology of a land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual art and social/life sciences to produce alternative non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and locales.
Truong Cong Tung has exhibited extensively in Vietnam and abroad as a solo artist and as part of Art Labor Collective. Select recent exhibitions include, “Is it morning for you yet?” 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2022), “State of Absence…Words out there. A collaborative installation by plants, insects, earth, water, ash, air... and Trương Công Tùng, Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam (2021), “The Sap still runs” (2019), San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok Biennale (2018), “Between Fragmentation and Wholeness” at Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City (2018), “A Beast, a God, and a Line” at Para Site, Hong Kong (2018) and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018), Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2018), Cosmopolis, Collective Intelligence, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), “Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs” at Para Site, Hong Kong (2017) and Kadist, San Francisco (2016), “Across the Forest,” an installation for Project Skylines with Flying People 3 at Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi (2016), and “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future” at Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2016).