NAF Hosts Student Workshop with Art Curator Jeab Gridthiya
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December, 2020
Visitors who came to the art tour of In Stranger Lands: Cocoa’s Journeys to Asia at EMASI Nam Long were led by Nhi Duong, through many (in)tangible touchpoints that explore the history of colonialism; labour exploitation; and the separation of culture and nature, the human and non-human, that persist to this day.
Stemming from the unique viewpoints of established artists based in Asia, including Cyril Delettre, Ravi Agarwal, Pan Lu & Bo Wang, Erika Tan, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Antariksa, Robert Zhao Renhui and Zheng Mahler – practitioners with strong connections to their local histories – the works commissioned for this exhibition expand beyond their physical form to invite interaction through all of our senses – embodied entry points to the artists’ fieldwork and research-based methods. There, cocoa – a product so ubiquitous, bittersweet, and in our time taken for granted – is dissected and reimagined in all its complexity.
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Nhi Duong graduated from the Journalism Department at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. Since 2022, she embarked on field trips to the Central Highlands, where her practice lies at the intersection of art and research, utilizing intangible cultural heritage materials such as folk tales, epics, fairy tales, and oral traditions of indigenous communities in the Central Highlands. She is now the Gallery Assistant at Nguyen Art Foundation.