Project Introduction
Founded in Hanoi in 2010 by 6 artists—Nguyễn Huy An, Vũ Đức Toàn, Ngô Thành Bắc, Nguyễn Văn Song, Hoàng Minh Đức, and Nguyễn Dương Hải Đăng—Phụ Lục is often known for their use of allegorical everyday objects as props in durational performances, abstract staging, and minimal yet potent gestures that both evoke social issues and explore personal concerns. From their early, tightly structured works marked by minimalist theatricality tied to both personal and national histories, Phụ Lục has gradually expanded into situational practices, constituting a vital yet under-recognized contribution to contemporary art in Vietnam.
Through an open-access living archive, a two-chapter exhibition opening in November 2025 across Nguyen Art Foundation’s two venues, a series of public programs, newly commissioned essays and artistic responses, the project not only positions Phụ Lục within the history of performance art in Vietnam and Southeast Asia but also opens a critical, reflective space to consider how performance can be remembered, reimagined, and carried forward.
This project is not a retrospective as the group remains active. The archive thus serves as both research and proposition, a point of departure rather than a conclusion. The project will unfold gradually during the exhibition and beyond. All updates and materials will be made publicly available at phulucproject.com.
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Without further ado, Phụ Lục Project is pleased to present:
Chapter I: Phụ Lục Through Whose Eyes?
Venue: Nguyen Art Foundation (EMASI Van Phuc)Opening hours: 10:00 - 16:00 every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday from 28/11/2025 to 15/05/2026
Curated by Vân Đỗ, Phụ Lục in whose eyes? dreams the collective’s resonant archive into being. Structured in three light-acts, the exhibition imagines a stage after the artists have departed, where objects, machines and residues carry the performance forward.
Dismantling the collective’s past works, the exhibition translates Phụ Lục’s props, sounds, compositions, and gestures into new assemblages, drawing on archival study, reproduction, and appropriation. Curating becomes an act of tracing, reinscription, and restaging, turning the impossibility of exhibiting performance art into a deliberate imaginative choice.
Performance exists in a moment, and dies when that moment ends. The exhibition takes place after death, remembering itself: full of gaps and ruptures, faltering in recollection, yet persistently alive. It is an effort to make visible what remains alive in the afterlife, dwelling in the generative void between original and revisit, and to reflect on performance in its historiographical force that is continuously layering, overwriting, and performing into the present.
Chapter II: Phụ Lục, How Are You?
Venue: Nguyen Art Foundation (EMASI Nam Long)Opening hours: 10:00 - 16:00 every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday from 28/11/2025 to 15/05/2026
Self-curated by Phụ Lục, Phụ Lục, How Are You? introduces new works created specifically for Phụ Lục Project.
“How are you?” belongs to the present, yet it also carries the potential to become hyper-present. The present may reveal traces of a past still unfolding through “self-reflection,” or it may project glimpses of the future through suggestion—even if only a near or very near future.
In everyday conversation, “how are you?” can be nothing more than a reflex, something blurted out when meeting, or even an empty formality when there is nothing left to say—at least we still offer each other a “how are you.” This sense of “nothing left to say” resonates closely with the colloquial understanding of the phrase Tứ Thập Bất Hoặc (At forty, no long in doubt): the threshold of one’s forties, when doubts have grown few and even fewer things remain that can still beguile or mislead them.
Appendix: Index 2010-2025
Presented in chronological order, Index 2010–2025 gathers an extensive body of images, videos, and texts documenting 37 works by Phụ Lục across the past fifteen years. Alongside these, it includes supplementary materials that situate the works within their broader artistic, social, and historical contexts—tracing not only the shifting landscape of performance art in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and beyond, but also the wider movements and discourses that have shaped the medium.
Index 2010–2025 is made accessible in two formats: a physical display that accompanies the exhibitions at the two venues of the Nguyễn Art Foundation during their public run, and an online platform at phulucproject.com, designed as a continuously updated resource for consultation, annotation, and research.
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With deep gratitude to: Quỳnh Nguyễn, Bill Nguyễn, Nhật Q. Võ, Đặng Thuỳ Anh, Lê Đình Chung, ARTICULATE Studio, Gabby Miller, Lem TragNguyen, Zoe Butt, Nguyễn Thị Hồng Anh.
Last updated: 25/09/2025 — subject to continuous revision