Memories and Heritage Considered Across Mediums at Dogma Prize Exhibition

How can personal and collective memories – alongside questions of community and heritage – be explored through artistic practices that span different mediums and respond to changing times?

Entering its twelfth edition, the 2025 Dogma Prize Exhibition brings together nine artists from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia: Hà Đào, Đỗ Văn Hoàng, Lê Tuấn Ry, Willie Xaiwouth, Hằng Hằng, Hul Kanha, Nguyễn Đức Tín, Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn, and Bi Tuyền. Organized by Dogma Collection, this year’s selection was made by a jury including artist Thảo Nguyên Phan, curator Bill Nguyễn, and art historian Pamela Corey – each of whom mentored three artists during the entire process leading up to the exhibition.

 A makeshift shelter stands at the end of the corridor upon one’s arrival, where ocean sounds and market noises emerge. Inside the shelter, Đỗ Văn Hoàng’s short film The Tofu Maker’s Son blends fiction and documentary to recount his family’s history in Hong Kong refugee camps and his father’s life as an undocumented worker. Structured like a series of court sessions, with re-staged police raids and conversations with his father, the film unfolds as a confrontational dialogue between past and present, examines painful memories of family displacement, while also leaving space for remembrance and healing.

Đỗ Văn Hoàng. The Tofu Maker’s Son, 2025. Short film, 20 mins 55s. Film still courtesy of the artist (left). Đỗ Văn Hoàng. Water Spinach, Garlic, Chili, Coke (audio), 2023 (right).

Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn’s series on miniature sculptures of everyday forms – Untitled (Notes on romance and cities), incorporates a system of feedback and sonic circuity, where street sounds, and melancholic music play on loop, as the objects remain hidden within wooden boxes along Dogma’s signature architectural structure. The installation evokes the feeling of mini theaters, with shifting backdrops behind a miniature couple, armchairs on a spinning stage, or flashing LED lights. The miniature works form a world on their own where time is trapped in repetition, with an emerging quiet sense of nostalgia and loneliness.

Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn. Untitled (Notes on romance and cities) 1, 2025. Plywood, stain, reversed clock mechanic, toy traffic light, LED running name tag (left). Thuỷ Tiên Nguyễn. Untitled (Notes on romance and cities) 2, 2025. Plywood, stain, phone screen (right).

Inspired by Western modernist painting techniques, Bi Tuyền fuses them with Vietnamese domestic imagery and childhood nostalgia through her monochromatic painting Seven Green Beans. The absence of colors invites viewers to pause and pay attention to lights, shadows, and forms, with the artist asking: “Can black and white condense something essential?” Upon closer observation, one may notice the subtle traces of color beneath the monochromatic surface. Created amidst times of rapid cultural changes, the work resembles a moment of stillness – a reflection on what we choose to remember from the past as we move forward.

Bi Tuyền. Seven Green Beans, 2025. Acrylic on canvas.

Known for merging Catholic faith with Vietnamese traditional culture, Nguyễn Đức Tín’s Faith, features black mosquito nets with slits that partly reveal portraits of Our Lady of La Vang (Đức Mẹ La Vang) and the Christ Child, and Catholic martyrs between the 17th and 19th centuries. Their lives remain largely unknown, yet they upheld their faith despite tragic deaths. The layered mosquito nets represent concealed histories, memory, belief, and the passage of time. Alongside is the Heart series where viewers’ distorted reflection appears – where faith is reframed not solely for religious devotion, but for one’s purpose and inner strength.

Nguyễn Đức Tín. Faith, 2025. Watercolor, oil pastel, acrylic, mosquito net, canvas.

Spanning across three different levels in between the staircases, Willie Xaiwouth’s The Fading Breath of Forgotten Words presents script embroidered onto fabric, using bamboo flowers collected from his hometown Saiyabouli (Laos). Viewed from above, the Tai Tham script flows downwards along the fabric and slowly fades away. Belonging to the Tai Yuan people, descendants of the Lan Na Kingdom between the 13th and 18th centuries, now scattered across Laos and Thailand, Willie weaves together his own story and a fragile cultural legacy amidst changes of history and modern times.

Willie Xaiwouth. The Fading Breath of Forgotten Words, 2025. Handmade calico, bamboo flowers, Tai Yuan traditional skirts, cotton sewing threads.

In a reimagined alternative world, Hà Đào portrayed the notorious Hải Phòng female gangster Dung Hà as a transgender man wandering through the street like a ghostly figure in If Heaven Awaits. The work takes the form of a music video with 1990s Vietnamese aesthetics with Lam Trường’s ballad “Đêm Nay Anh Mơ Về Em”. Accompanied with the video work also features two laser-engraved crystal cubes, Castle I (Vũ Hoàng Dung’s Tomb) & Castle II (Đồ Sơn Casino), an empire that faded and now exists only in memory and imagination. Focusing on marginal lives, her works also resist and question mainstream narratives, stereotypes and social norms. 

Hà Đào. If Heaven Awaits, 2024. Audio, video, 6 mins 39s. Castle I (Vũ Hoàng Dung’s Tomb) & Castle II (Đồ Sơn Casino), 2024 (left). Laser-engraved crystal cube, wooden stand, LED strip. Film still courtesy of the artist (right).

Unforgotten Land glows softly in a darkened space. Composed of hair stitched and pressed onto fabric by Hằng Hằng and her family, the work was created from a collective effort and speaks for family’s history and internal dynamics. The hair, gathered from her mother’s salon and the surrounding community, forms a surface resembling a fragile, scorched grassland. Each strand carries memories of war, conflicts, migration, yet also love and care. Through the material intimacy of hair, the work also reflects on what it means to collect, inherit, and carry historical legacies onward.

Hằng Hằng. Unforgotten Land, 2025. Hair, faux leather fabric.

Hul Kanha’s installation Plates of the Passed comprises fifty papier-mâché sculptures floating on thin poles across the space. Rendered with vibrant colours and childlike brushstrokes, the plates combine painted imagery, black-and-white photographs of childhood and family memories, sewn red threads, and gold paint. The brushstrokes and threads appear to hold cracks and lines together, while also evoking childhood trauma shaped by extreme hardship in rural Siem Reap. On these fragile surfaces, childhood memories are reworked through the artist’s adult perspective and personal recollection.

Hul Kanha. Plates of the Passed, 2025. Cycle paper, acrylic, sewing silk.

On the highest floor, Lê Tuấn Ry’s 18 Realms of Mound is placed behind a red curtain. Here, the visitors assume the role of spectators, activating a music box and observing a vertical row of CCTV screens that display a site-specific installation composed of old X-ray films of anonymous bodies – collected from clinics and hospitals and threaded together – located in an unknown, remote place. His work poses questions of surveillance and perception: "who is watching, who is being watched, and what becomes of that which slips outside the frame?"

Lê Tuấn Ry. 18 Realms of Mound, 2025. Old X-ray film, industrial safety pins, claw machine motors, car display screens, music boxes (installation block), water coconut fronds, charred wood, found steel base, aluminium profiles, asphalt, mother-of-pearl powder, red velvet curtains (screen block).

Dogma is a private collection and exhibition space dedicated to archival and contemporary art in and around Vietnam. Starting as a collection of revolutionary propaganda posters, the collection has since expanded into three interconnected programs: Collection, Research, and Prize. Now in its twelfth edition, the Dogma Prize has grown alongside Dogma Collection, evolving from an award focused on self-portraiture into a platform that celebrates the diversity of artistic practices across the region.

The 2025 Dogma Prize Exhibition is now on view at 27A Nguyễn Cừ, An Khánh Ward, Ho Chi Minh City until 28 February 2026.