What an exhibition by artists of the Vietnamese diaspora says about home and belonging
Visitors to the current exhibition at London’s Museum of the Home are asked to bear this question in mind.
- Visitors to the current exhibition at London’s Museum of the Home are asked to bear this question in mind.
- Entitled No Place Like Home (A Vietnamese Exhibition) Part II, the show brings together eight artists, born and raised all over the world, who share roots in Vietnam.
- Plastic chairs, Vietnamese food – even the word “Vietnamese” itself – will, for many visitors, signify expensive holidays, beaches and islands.
- But for those in the Vietnamese diaspora, these same signifiers can conjure up far more complicated memories.
Hidden histories
- This multilingualism references a hidden layer of meaning to which many customers with no Vietnamese connection will be oblivious.
- He renders these hidden layers of meaning visible by transferring a childhood family photograph, taken when he was six, on to the surface of a moon-shaped vase from the Chinese Ming dynasty, the last to rule Vietnam.
- Within Asian diasporas, differences can lose their significance when it comes to carving out a place of their own.
Diasporic placemaking
- Diasporic placemaking is often a story of connection.
- But it is also a complicated story about who owns public spaces and decides who gets to use them.
- At the exhibition opening, the French artist Carô Gervay told me that this was the first time Vietnamese diasporic artists had been given space by a publicly funded institution in the UK.
- The ambivalence she felt at this is further elaborated on in the work she has made in collaboration with the UK artist Cường Minh Bá Phạm.