» Xin loi

Xin loi consists of twelve ink drawings on dó paper, each bearing the words “Xin loi – Excuse me – Excusez moi” written in black and red ink. The work was created in response to an act of censorship at the duo exhibition Cultural Collision by Truong Tan and American artist Bradford Edwards at Red River Gallery, Hanoi, in 1995. Shortly before the exhibition opened, a number of Truong Tan’s drawings were removed by cultural authorities for containing sensitive imagery – a recurring subject in his practice that openly explored sexuality, freedom, and self-expression in a conservative social climate. In the wake of this intervention, Truong Tan replaced the censored works with the twelve Xin loi drawings – a gesture at once ironic, poetic, and profoundly defiant. 

This body of work marked a significant milestone in the history of contemporary Vietnamese art, symbolizing both the limits of artistic freedom and the power of art to resist them. The repeated phrase “xin loi” (meaning “sorry”) becomes a multilayered statement – an apology to no one and everyone, oscillating between sincerity and satire. Written in simple, almost childlike strokes, the words carry the weight of critical honesty and cultural critique. As artist Nguyen Minh Thanh later reflected: 

“That incident has since become a sacred anecdote in the history of Vietnamese art after the Đổi Mới (Renovation) period. The paintings that left [Truong Tan’s] studio to be exhibited, by some cruel miracle, got turned into an apology. An apology written in brushstrokes so simple and naïve suddenly became the artwork itself, transformed by the magic of sincerity. The word “sorry” was repeated over and over again at a time when our society had nearly forgotten its meaning, when the cultural air was starved of apology, buried under decades of fanaticism and hatred. The work melted something within us – his students – and from there, we began to understand what art truly is.”