Exploring Vietnam’s Dynamic, Diverse Artist Residencies [Part Two: Huế, Hội An and Đà Nẵng]

A subtle shimmer inherent to the seashells encrusted around its eyes makes Lân Sư Hồ shiver with life and appear as if it will leap out of the warehouse and prance into the ocean where its coral skin once grew. 

Standing beside the statue that Tường Danh conceived of and created at AirHue, the residency’s founder, Thanh (Nu) Mai, explained how he encourages artists to “just dream big.” It is then his job as a producer to “adjust and work with them to make the best version of it.” 

While visits to artist residencies participating in the GoSEA program in Saigon and Đà Lạt introduced Saigoneer to a range of atmospheres and ethos that artist residences embody, as we discussed in part one, exploring several in the central region helped us understand their aims and approaches to producing work. 

Intention, outcomes, and expertise promoted at AirHue

Another work by Tường Danh realized at AIRHue. 

“I think our team's ambition is to build really good works that can stand on themselves; we're very fortunate to be in a city where the historical meets the contemporary,” explained AirHue’s in-house curator, Nguyễn Minh Ngọc. Their balance of focus on specific outcomes and embrace of Huế’s unique heritage of arts and crafts is possible because of Thanh and Ngọc’s experience. With more than 20 years of collective involvement in arts management and operations, they have the skills and knowledge to actively steer artists in fruitful directions. Beginning with detailed proposals, the team questions, suggests, guides, and hopes to inspire during weekly meetings to help each artist best realize their vision in a way that is realistic and coherent with the art world, financially and otherwise. “The creative process is very much like participating in a world-building process with the artist, and the thing about world-building is that it's non-exhaustive; there's always more. And the creative process is very much [about] pushing against the limits,” Ngoc summarizes.

Until now, this arduous creative process takes place primarily in and around a classic Huế home in a small neighborhood a few kilometers from the city center. Fruit trees offer shade beside large statues created by past residents and friends, illustrating the emphasis on finished work ready for public exhibition, open studio, or talk by the time the residency ends. Complete with private studios, bedrooms, and shared kitchen and dining room, it's a home base for artists as well as a site of connection. The garden serves as a community meeting point that hosts lectures, film screenings, experimental sound sessions, and workshops, from artists in residence and outside practitioners. And since our visit in March, AirHue announced the opening of a secondary residency site in Kim Sơn artist village, an area known for our much beloved Lê Bá Đảng Memorial Space and Nguyễn Văn Hè’s Art Barracks, which we are excited to check out. 

Time spent working individually and with the AirHue team is enhanced by opportunities to learn from the city’s rich legacies via guided visits to local workspaces, artisan villages, and artist studios, alongside meetings with University of Huế students and faculty, depending on needs and interests. During our visit, for example, we travelled to a local artist’s home to learn about and even experiment with a form of paper art he’d invented.

Shortly after we left Huế, Tường Danh’s Lân Sư Hồ was boxed up and shipped off to Saigon, where it went on exhibition at Galerie Quynh as part of a show curated by another former AirHue resident. Such visibility and successful presence in the art world underscore that the big dreams artists develop at the residency are indeed achievable.

In the shadows of monoculture forests, A Sông fosters research and dialogues 

Descending a mountain outside Đà Nẵng, the vibrant collage of leaves, vines, bushes, and shrubs comes to a sudden stop, replaced by rows of uniform tree trunks. When looked through, they resemble bare pencils lined up in a factory, a far cry from the lush nature one imagines when staring at the green cliffs from a distance. Covering vast swathes of land in Hoà Phú, the western mountainous region of Đà Nẵng, the harvested acacia is used to make woodchips, paper, furniture, and housing materials. But the unnatural forests are at risk of fire and contribute to landslides and floods. Moreover, when a complex and interconnected ecosystem is removed, an entire chain of organisms vanishes, as evidenced by an eerie lack of bird songs. The impact on human communities is no less devastating.

Xuân Hạ, a cross-disciplinary artist, organizer, and founder of A Sông, a collective of photographers, visual artists, performance artists, curators, and filmmakers, perhaps best known to Saigoneer readers through their Nổ Cái Bùm travelling contemporary art week, grew up near these monoculture plantations. She began exploring them more closely as part of her ongoing research-based and community-focused inquiry and recognized broader ecological and historical patterns of relationships between human societies and natural ecosystems that could inform her art practices. She also formed relationships with local knowledge holders, including environmental experts, social workers, artists, and members of the Cơ Tu ethnic minority group, who are the area’s long-term inhabitants and likely descendants of an indigenous culture. In the process, she became familiar with Toom Sara Village, a recreational space built with support from Cơ Tu individuals.

2024 Nổ Cái Bùm photo by Tống Khánh Hà.

A Sông’s residency program, a natural extension of Xuân Hạ’s research, incorporates Toom Sara as a base of exploration for visiting artists. True to A Sông’s ethos of collaboration and community dialogue, she envisions the artist residency can connect practitioners with worlds beyond familiar art spaces and systems. “I want to show artists here that there is another way outside of institutions to do art; I want to soften the boundaries and encourage artists to engage more with social work, ecological systems, and life experience beyond galleries.”

Xuân Hạ. Photo via Heritage Art Space.

Artists working across genres who are open to exploring these concerns through non-artistic forms of knowledge, particularly indigenous practices and community-based ecological wisdom, will receive support from A Sông’s dedicated team and the networks they’ve cultivated, which include researchers, scholars and artists in studios, museums and libraries within Đà Nẵng. Field trips into the forest, workshops, collective meals, and public sharing sessions, such as open studios, further integrate residency participants into local discussions. 

A Sông’s residency is just beginning, but their long-established connections and the successful artistic pursuits of collective members will help ensure visiting artists have illuminating, productive stays. The program is not overly concerned with final outcomes, and while Xuân Hạ hopes for open studios or events upon their conclusion, the larger hope is that enduring dialogues and relationships are formed and knowledge gained for long-term artistic investigations. 

Honoring Hội An’s heritage, Kyara Arthouse functions as a trading post of arts, ideas, and inspirations

While A Sông encourages artists to look to the mountains and the communities impacted by environmental degradation, Kyara Arthouse introduces residency participants to Hội An’s rich legacy of arts, crafts, and creative ideas as informed by its history as a regional trading port. As part of Asia’s maritime trade routes, Japanese merchants arrived in Hội An searching for, amongst other items, kyara, a Japanese word for the highest grade of agarwood, or trầm hương. The precious, resin-laden ingredient used in incense, perfume, and traditional medicine gives Kyara Arthouse not only its name, which is hand-painted in Chinese name-seal characters by local artist and calligrapher Ngô Đức Chí across the building’s noren curtains at the entrance, but also explains why several agarwood trees grow in the lush private garden between the Thu Bồn River and the purpose-built art space, creating a clear connection between the residency and the city’s history of exchange. 

Hội An’s heritage of cross-pollinated art forms, materials, and sources of inspiration is visible throughout Kyara, including the gallery space’s permanent collection, which includes a growing selection of paintings, prints, artifacts, and textiles from across Asia. Kyara operates as a boutique Airbnb when artists are not in residence, and the private bedrooms and communal spaces contain a thrilling assemblage of original works, particularly lacquer, gouache, and ink from Phạm Ngọc Sỹ, who is the father of Phạm Ngọc Trâm, the residency’s co-founder. We were particularly excited to see an early collaboration with Boris Zuliani from the nearby Một Mét Studio, which showcases the 19th-century wet plate collodion photography process in a unique series of 10 portraits honouring the team of workers who built the house and shaped the aesthetic of the interior’s upcycled wooden furniture and fittings. The riverside trading post for creatives works, Trâm notes, because “as artists you are like curious children, you want to see more of the world. You ask questions, you try new things, you meet new people.”

Trâm, a graduate of Hanoi’s famed University of Fine Arts, the direct descendant of the L'École des beaux-arts de l'Indochine, focuses on silk embroidery, natural fibres, and textile arts with a particular interest in illuminating their significance in Vietnam’s history in her on-site Meo Meo Atelier studio. Meanwhile, the space’s other co-founder, James Compton, is a writer with a multi-disciplinary background in the arts as well as biodiversity conservation and natural resource trade. Their collective appreciation for Hội An’s history, nature, and art allows them to support writers, painters, sound-artists, film-makers and curators who are in search of a focused residence retreat combined with opportunities to engage proactively with central Vietnam. The residency outcomes and duration are flexible, including presentations of works and practice by visiting artists

“I think what artists need the most for the creative flow is space,” James shared when asked about what about Kyara appeals to artists. “It's not just a room. Some artists need an environment, say, an apartment with a lot of artists around. Some artists need the right amount of inspiration and interruption, and they can find at Kyara where art grows and flows … we have enough space and we have a good balance of interaction and separation.”

Trâm then chimed in to emphasize the role of nature. “In art school, we were taught that nature is the best art master. And here in Hội An you have the mountainous area … the river, the islands, the sea.” As the late afternoon sun started to sink towards the river meandering behind the bamboo grove where she sat to show her tapestry, it all made sense. ”Nature, landscape, animals, birds, reptiles, natural dyes, natural fibers; all the ancient wisdom that shows how people in the past understood and lived with nature can be found here in everyday life.”

Saigoneer’s look at artist residencies will conclude soon with a trip to Hanoi and lessons in how the programs can cater to niche communities and practitioners. You can read about our visits to Saigon and Đà Lạt in part one here and our trip to Hanoi in part three here.