Nguyễn Trần Nam "Through the looking glass" (2022)

From mid-August, Vietnamese artist Linh San has been taking part in a residency program in the Nishinari area.
As part of her activities, she will organize two screenings of the same program featuring video works by Vietnamese artists on Monday, September 15 and Sunday, October 5.

"Human-made. Tech-tales." features animation and stop-motion works by Vietnamese artists, created using a range of techniques and image-making methods, from traditional animation to CGI and AI motion capture. The language of moving images is inherently tied to the devices that gave birth to it, such as cameras and sound equipment, as well as projection tools. With animation, the involvement of the human hand and its craft nature evoke a meticulous process of both real and imagined manipulation. The painstaking labor between artist and tools ultimately results in very different trajectories of world perception for each viewer.

Among the six participating artists, one was formally trained in media art; some began with backgrounds in painting; and for others, this may be a rare animated work within their broader practice. Each video is a dimension. A burnout worker ant. The cosmos of a mole. An islet emerges at the tail of a river branch. Things once external become internalized. A graphite world of mazes shaped by imagination and sensation. A man skipping rope, moving within an unchanging house but in the end, it is the house in the background that shifts, while he remains still in his own motion.

Participating Artists

Nguyễn Thái Bảo
Nguyễn Trần Nam
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Nguyễn Đức Huy
Xuân Hạ
Quế (Nguyễn Đức Hùng)

● Screened works

Floater (2025), 03:07
Nguyễn Thái Bảo

Floater traverses the blurred boundary between vision and perception, machine and self. Using the metaphor of “floaters”– tiny specks drifting across the vitreous of the eye – the film draws a conceptual parallel to the imperceptible architectures of digital life. Social networks, AI algorithms, and technological infrastructures– once visible innovations – have receded into a new kind of opacity, quietly guiding perception from the backend.
Guided by the relationship between opaque and transparent technologies, Floater visualizes how digital systems mirror the human eye’s own blind spots. The film overlays anatomical imagery of the eye with fragments of neural interfaces and abstract network data, raising the question of what we see, and more importantly, what remains hidden beneath the surface.
Floater reveals how technology’s most powerful mechanisms are those we no longer see–not because they are invisible, but because they’ve become internalized.

Through the looking glass (2022), 22:00
Nguyễn Trần Nam

Nguyễn Trần Nam’s stop-motion video guides us through an imaginary underground maze of thirteen tunnels. Instead of a lush magical world like in “Alice in Wonderland”, or gruesome hell in Dante’s “Inferno”, life in each tunnel is not that much different from our current reality.

Elysium without Shores (2024), 10:08
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần

Elysium without Shores is a kaleidoscope of digital divination and time travel. It imagines a futurist “múa bóng rỗi” ritual on an island in Cổ Chiên River of the Mekong Delta, the crossroads of Greco-Roman and the Funan Óc Eo civilization. Their ritual culminates in destroying a hydroelectric dam system at the source of the Mekong River that has adversely affected the delicate ecologies that the river runs through. This climatic and cosmic destruction is a complex critique of contemporary industrialization and a symbolic reclaiming of modernization trajectories that have gone awry.

Cardio (2022), 04:07
Nguyễn Đức Huy

Scenes of a man skipping rope maximising his respiratory system’s capacity are interwoven with those of a lived home space, whose absent owner’s presence is still apparent through animated objects. Dressed in a green chroma-keyed suit, the rope-skipping man remains as himself whereas his background is the element that keeps changing, ironically.

Grandmadead’s Mole Cosmos (2017), 01:10
Xuân Hạ

In another universe, humans grow from seeds that multiply like microscopic bacteria. As solitary seeds, they embark on a long journey of living and evolving, seeking to understand their identities amidst a vast and crowded cosmos. This short animation explores the microscopic world of a mole - a tiny cosmos teeming with life and self-discovery.

Labor is glory? (2025), 01:00
Quế (Nguyễn Đức Hùng)

The story of an ant who died from overwork

Profile

Nguyễn Trần Nam
Born in 1979 in Hưng Yên, Nguyễn Trần Nam moved to Hanoi when he was 7 and graduated from the Hanoi University of Fine Arts in 2003. As an artist, he utilizes various materials and media to create, including video, installation, painting, and performing arts.
His works – being quite pessimistic and cynical – concern with the feelings about relationships between humans. He uses his feelings and experiences of his own to form his works. In his practices, Nam tends to take interest in the dark, hidden and forgotten fraction between the past and presence, faith and retribution, and random tales that hold memory as well as history.

Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
An art laborer based in Saigon. She creates art both collectively and individually and also curates and writes. Her artworks combine politics and sci-fi aesthetics through the use of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. Arlette is fascinated by the idea of a futuristic Third World utopia where political ideals are reimagined, and humans and non-human beings coexist and merge. She presents a non-linear and absurd interpretation of modern histories that challenges the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World.
Together with visual artists Trương Công Tùng & Phan Thảo Nguyên, she co-founded the Art Labor collective, which operates at the intersection of visual arts, social, and life sciences in various public contexts and locales, working on long-term, multiple output projects.

Nguyễn Đức Huy
Born in 1995, Hanoi. A visual artist whose mediums include painting, illustration, digital art, installation and animation. Huy’s aesthetic is full of vivid colours with red, blue, green dominating his paper, canvas and screen, which suggest the influence of digital aesthetic. Neat in details and composition, his works are imbued with humour, quirkiness yet at the same time evoking a sense of confusion and detachment. In 2023, he had his first solo exhibition Soon The Time Will Come at Á Space, Hanoi. His works have been featured in various group exhibitions and screenings include: S.E.A. Focus 2024 (Singapore, 2024), Kontrapunkte-Voices On SCREEN (Staatlich Kunstsamlungen Dresden, Germany, 2022), This is not a love song (Like the Moon in A Night Sky 3, Hanoi, 2022), Running on a golden road (Á Space, Hanoi, 2021), Virtual Private Realms (Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, 2021), Second Opinion (Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, 2019), Hobbling Pedestrian (Nhà Sàn Studio, 2016).

Xuân Hạ
An art worker whose practice spans roles as an artist, producer, and organizer, with a strong commitment to community-oriented work. Her approach centers on fostering creative empowerment and nurturing self-directed learning through art and curiosity. Her recent research explores the post-war impact on natural environments and the ways in which plant migration reshapes social contexts nowadays. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates moving images, installation, and conceptual art, Xuân Hạ reconfigures personal imaginations into visual narratives. Her work constructs a discursive space that critically engages with the fluidity of identity, the impermanence of place, and the fragility of cultural continuity in the face of environmental and social transformation. Besides working as an artist, Xuân Hạ also plays an active role in building and expanding the local art community in Vietnam. She is the co-founder of Chaosdowntown Cháo (HCMC, 2015-2019) and more recently, the founder and artistic director of A Sông (Đà Nẵng, 2019-present).

Quế (aka Nguyễn Đức Hùng)
A self-taught visual artist and independent producer from Đà Nẵng, currently based in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam. His practice explores post-medium conditions with the symbol of water, centering on the idea of "things found in water," evolving from “family inheritance through water in the body” to “humans in urban water flows” and the broader “exchange between humans and the environment.”