Adventures in Chinese Fiction
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22 June 2025
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A conversation between Teng Yen Hui, Kasamaponn (Waew) Saengsuratham, and Van Do, moderated by Bill Nguyen
They say, performance thrives in the moment. In its liveness, its ephemerality. They also say, it’s the smell, the temperature, the humidity, the crowd, the artist’s mood that day, that makes a performance what it is. And then Peggy Phelan, in her important book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), has even gone so far to claim that: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.” – Van Do, Post-performance: Again, again, and again, presentation at Translocal Performance Art Giswil 2025 (Switzerland, 2025) and Photo Hanoi ‘25 (Vietnam, 2025).
However, it is precisely this short lifespan that has made performance art difficult to access and to grasp, and that has, paradoxically, both marginalized it within contemporary art history and fostered myths around its existence.
In recent years, Southeast Asia has witnessed a number of institutional and curatorial efforts to research, archive, and exhibit performance art, alongside long-term, artist-led self-archiving practices by senior artists such as Lee Wen, Tran Luong, and Koh Nguang How. This conversation focuses on curatorial methodologies involved in working with the afterlives of performance, through specific case studies: Teng Yen Hui’s The Living Room (Singapore Art Museum, 2025–2026), which engages with performance remains in SAM’s collection; Kasamaponn (Waew) Saengsuratham’s Live Art and Lifeworlds of Chumpon Apisuk (Bangkok Art and Culture Center, 2025), a multi-layered project presented at BACC that encompassed an archival exhibition, an open-access website, public programs, and experimental formats such as a board game; and Van Do’s Phụ Lục Project (2025–ongoing), currently on view and presented at Nguyễn Art Foundation and continuously updated via the project website phulucproject.com.
Confronting the irreproducibility of live performance, The afterlives of live performance poses a deliberately unresolved question: to exhibit or not to exhibit performance art once the live moment has passed? Rather than treating documentation and display as compromises, this conversation asks three speakers to discuss their active curatorial decisions – ones that hold space for performance’s ongoing, unstable life without fixing it into myth or monument. The three speakers will share their curatorial and research methodologies, strategies for working with institutions to activate and sustain the longevity of performance works, as well as questions that remain unresolved.
The conversation will be moderated by Bill Nguyen, Director of Nguyễn Art Foundation, artist-curator, and co-founder (with Nguyen Phuong Linh and Gabby Miller) of IN:ACT – one of the longest-running performance art festivals in Vietnam – who will also contribute personal observations from his perspective as a collector, artist, and curator.
Bringing together curators working closely with performance archives, collections, and long-term performance practices in Southeast Asia, the conversation examines how performance persists through remains, collections, reenactments, and institutional frameworks.