Museum of the Home

• 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.