» Walking on Earth (White Mist In Foreign Country series)

Walking on Earth belongs to Nguyen Phuong Linh’s series White Mist in Foreign Country, a body of work born from the artist’s experience of moving from Hanoi to Frankfurt in 2015. What began as research and conversation evolved into a shared space of intimacy between the artist and a community of diasporic Vietnamese women working in nail salons across Germany where the artist worked as a nail model. These women’s stories of migration and labor became the foundation for Phuong Linh’s exploration of displacement and belonging.

For Walking on Earth, Phuong Linh invited the nail salon workers to transform a set of vintage globes into personal canvases. Painted by many hands, the globes became carriers of collective memory, layered with traditional and religious symbols from Vietnamese folk culture, shadowy figures recalling colonial-era prisoners, and visual hints of movement – footsteps, suitcases, traces of departure and return.

Through this quiet, collaborative act, Walking on Earth turns the globe – a universal symbol of geography and power – into a tender, personal record of survival, adaptation, and resilience. Each globe no longer maps territory but traces a lived, emotional landscape, where migration is not an abstract statistic but an intimate, ongoing condition of human life.

The work is on permanent display at the Khai Sang headquarters, Paragon, HCMC, Vietnam.