Reunification-1 Journey  

Performance and installation by Phụ Lục (Nguyễn Huy An, Ngô Thành Bắc, Vũ Đức Toàn, Nguyễn Văn Song)
2015
Presented as part of Nhà Sàn Collective's Skylines with flying people 3. Photo courtesy of Nhà Sàn Studio and the artists.
“Reunification-1 Journey” documents Phụ Lục’s voyage from Hà Nội to Sài Gòn on the TN1 (Reunification) train. Following a physically unchanged route and carrying with them as belongings significant and allegorical objects, the artist group passes through and collides with multiple complex times and spaces that are historically crucial in the story of Việt Nam’s struggle to reconcile its halves.

Concept Note: Lữ Trình Series by Phụ Lục


As in many of Phụ Lục’s earlier practices, objects—whether singular, in groups, or in fragments of tools and materials—remain central to the work. These items are collected and gathered by members of the group across different times and places, many of them familiar household objects that have accompanied them for years. These are “speaking” objects, evoking an elusive sense of origin and of a historical time that feels both distant and as if it had just passed in a blink. They become memory because, seen in the present, they appear obsolete. What do such objects mean for artists born in the early 1980s? Can they represent identity itself? For Phụ Lục, these objects are consistently placed at the “most honored positions” within their artistic practice.

This time, Lữ Trình (Journey) unfolds like an exodus: carrying bundles of personal belongings, wandering, dislocated, and destabilized in context and origin, while struggling to find footing in a present that no longer accommodates them. Phụ Lục seeks to underscore the existence of these objects carried on humble shoulders, together with the bodies that bear them. Do people cling to their objects, or do people change alongside the histories of their objects? When deemed obsolete or “dead,” objects are often frozen behind museum glass or discarded at waste grounds. Yet when still carried on the body, might they still be breathing—if only faintly?

The method: these objects become inseparable companions, staying with the artists throughout the entire journey, whether in movement, in eating, in sleeping. Lữ Trình – Lữ Oán Ngâm Khúc (Journey – A Ballad of Grievance) may be seen as a mournful poem, a restless flipping through blurred and hidden pages of memory.

Performance Structure
  • Part 1: routes largely fixed along the North–South railway.
  • Part 2: more erratic driftings, branching out from Part 1 routes and generating unpredictable trajectories.

EXHIBITION

Nhà Sàn Collective
Address: 15th Floor, Hanoi Creative City, 1 Lương Yên, Hai Bà Trưng dist.
Opening: 18h00 Friday 18 November 2016
Duration: 18 November – 18 December 2016
15h00 - 19h00 Wednesday - Sunday
Artists: Phụ Lục (The Appendix), Nguyễn Trần Nam, Nguyễn Ban Ga, Nguyễn Quốc Thành

Photo by Linh Cam. Courtesy of Nhà Sàn Collective and Phụ Lục.
Last updated: 06/09/2025 — subject to continuous revision