An index to The Appendix

The Appendix 

1. a tube-shaped sac attached to and opening into the lower end of the large intestine in humans and some other mammals.
2. a section or table of additional matter at the end of a book or document.
3. Phụ Lục: Nguyễn Huy An, Vũ Đức Toàn, Ngô Thành Bắc, Hoàng Minh Đức, Nguyễn Dương Hải Đăng, Nguyễn Văn Song. 6 alumni from Vietnam Fine Art University that got to know each other from their school days. Starting in 2010, they dressed in uniform white shirts and black pants and practiced as a group focused on performance art. 

To begin, I wrote them a letter. I spoke of how their practice, most significantly their use of spatial dramaturgy as a curatorial framework, had an impact on mine and how I wished to work with them, even after an earlier rejection. Fifteen years on, Phụ Lục remains active, though the number of members that participated in the performances shifts from performance to performance. This is by no means a retrospective exhibition. The act of looking back at their past work is not intended as a conclusion, but rather as an effort to archive and champion them from a vantage point—one that is both distant and proximate. Distant due to a generational gap and the fact that I have only experienced most of their works indirectly, mostly through documentation, either video or photography or word-of-mouth. Close because of geographical proximity, personal friendships, and professional collaboration on various projects. Curating an exhibition for a performance art group, or in other words, exhibiting performance is an oxymoron. On one side: the momentary, the live, the direct, the presence of the body—alive. On the other: the static, the stretched-out time (in this case, six months), the indirect, the absence of the body—even death (here I think of nature morte, or “dead nature” as a metaphor for performance once its live moment has passed).

For this piece of writing, I refer to them as Phụ Lục—not as a descriptor, but as a person’s name. This document serves as a living record of an evolving project, which will culminate in a two-chapter exhibition in Saigon at the end of 2025, in which Phụ Lục allowed me ultimate freedom to curate from the repository of their past performances.

1. Here I refer specifically to how Phụ Lục’s deployment of the storage-unit system—both spatially and conceptually—functioned as a curatorial strategy in their project Skylines with flying people 4 (Mini Kingkho, Hanoi, 2020), and how it later informed my own curatorial intervention in White Noise (Nguyen Art Foundation, 2023), an exhibition that sparked considerable debate.

I. Making a list of objects

In Phụ lục’s performances, objects play a vital role, carrying personal, familial, and national histories. Among the belongings tied to each member, I've felt drawn to certain items—partly based on personal affinity (rather than attempting a complete inventory), and partly because these objects feel like portraits of each artist.

• an oversized yellow plant-growing light
• a self-operating photocopier ejecting black sheets
• an old school drum without drumsticks, suspended from the ceiling
• an automated tortoise carrying a lacquered crane 
• a piece of cotton candy 
• a pool of charcoal, inside it: black ink
• a glass tank filled with tofu residue
• a solar-powered light piano

2. A confessional atmosphere wrapped the space and the bodies in it in an intensely immortal yellow.

3. A key element in Phụ Lục’s group performance, The anatomy of a faulty production line, with the rare participation of all 6 members at Nhà Sàn Studio in 2010, in which Đăng photocopied black sheets of paper; An spread the stack across the floor in checkered lines; Toàn climbed a ladder to replace a light bulb; Song, like a diacritical mark, lay slanted across the stage, his head pressed against a pillar; Bắc traced the boundary between audience and stage, pacing back and forth with a plumb line in hand. The photocopier streaked green laser beams.

4. In Phụ Lục’s Somniloquy 4 in Future of Imagination (Singapore, 2012), Song aimed the drumstick at a single point on the drum, but he never struck it.

5. Bắc invited a pet turtle to take part in the group performance Somniloquy 4 at Nhà Sàn Studio during their 15th anniversary exhibition. The turtle bore a lacquered crane on its back, moving slowly. Midway through the performance, the police came uninvited, abruptly bringing it to an end.

6. A cotton candy appeared with Nin, Toàn’s daughter, as part of Toàn’s performance Eating (outside) needs no explanation at Á Space, 2022, a re-enactment inspired by Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s UNSUBTITLED (2010). In both performances, each participant invited to take part in the performance would choose a food item for themselves. The two performances are 12 years apart. Cotton candy is Nin’s favorite. 

7. Frozen rain, a performance by Phụ Lục for IN:ACT 2010 at Nhà Sàn Studio, was conceived as a fictional encounter along the riverside during the dry season between a fisherman, a coal worker, and the son of a tofu shop owner, who had died in debt. For more than an hour, Đức remained submerged in a tank of tofu residue; Toàn, soaked from head to toe, was tied to a pillar with one hand holding a fish; and An sat on a chair in a pool of peat, two small mounds of coal resting in his palms. The three of them were all wet, silent, and frozen.

8. Ibid.

9. In Bắc’s open studio, part of Phụ Lục’s residency with MoT+++ in Saigon in 2018, he created a “piano” from solar-powered lights, which members of Phụ Lục played live using various objects to cast shifting shadows on the solar panels. Everyone played music with light.

• 6 GrabBike jackets
• a straw mat, cut into six sections
• a riddle of empty self-storage units
• four military compasses

Through conversations with Bắc and Song, I learned that their early works as art graduates were grounded in the fundamental principles of figure drawing—proportion, composition, form, axis, direction, lighting—and often referenced classical paintings. In their later works, they moved away from these frameworks, yet their visual thinking continues to draw on the foundations instilled during their training at the former École des Beaux-Arts. As a curator, I was never trained in figure drawing. Once, an artist even told me “I can't draw.” For the exhibition Phụ Lục through whose eyes?, I would like to practice figure drawing in space, using their borrowed objects as found materials.

II. Making a list of sounds

In Phụ Lục’s group performances, sounds create rhythms and pace the performances. Sounds are movements themselves, attuned to bodies in space and to friction between material and flesh. Sound is also the most elusive element when it comes to documenting performance. Like adjectives, sounds hover on the edge of language, resisting textual reinterpretations. This is my playlist of favorite sounds assembled from their works, through which I wonder if a sound-based performance work could be remixed and produced in space.

• the whipping of a stone dog
• the slosh of water in a bucket, tethered to the mouth with a rubber strip torn from a motorbike’s inner tube
• the high-pitched whistle of water rising through a spouted kettle
• the ink-blackened rice grains striking the wall, then scattering to the ground
• the gurgling of honey in the mouth

 10. Grab, a technology-based ride-hailing service, was introduced to Vietnam in 2014 and has since transformed the country’s urban lifestyle and streetscape. Its green-uniformed drivers have become a defining presence on the roads, emblematic of a new urban workforce. In a performance in Huế during the Nổ Cái Bùm Art Festival (2020), Phụ Lục donned these uniforms, transforming themselves into Grab drivers as they carried a styrofoam cut-out inscribed with a quote from Emperor Duy Tân. In another untitled work, they enlisted more than ten actual Grab drivers to deliver packages of objects from their earlier piece Reunification–1 Journey to Manzi Art Space, where the work was being sold to a collector. The gathering of Grab drivers at the gallery created a comic scene.

11. The sedge mat, an object commonly used in traditional Northern Vietnamese domestic and ritual spaces, appeared frequently in the early works of Phụ Lục. The mat determined the spatial arrangement among the group’s members and their relation to the physical site of the performance. In Somniloquy 4, presented at Future of Imagination (Singapore), the mat was cut into six pieces, with each member standing on one piece.

12. The Skyline with flying people 4 exhibition, curated by Phụ Lục, took place at Minikingkho, Hanoi at the end of 2019 and early 2020, amidst COVID-19 social distancing. The show sparked heated debates about the “authoritarian / authorial” role of curators. Phụ Lục decided what was shown, by whom, how it was shown, and how much of each work to include—leaving artists with only the choice to accept or reject. There wasn’t much to argue about. In curatorial language, there is a term: the curatorial frame. I chose to exhibit that very frame—the sea-blue shelving system of that project—as an artwork in its own right.

III. Making a list of phrases 

Titles of their works hint at locally specific wisdom or oral histories, yet remain riddled with ambiguity and poetry.

• Chúng ta ươm lại hoa (We replant the flowers)

13. Within a closed composition encircling a familiar sedge mat, Bắc stood with his back to the group, gripping an electric cord and whipping the stone dog seated at his feet. It was part of Somniloquy 2.

14. In the three-person performance Somniloquy 3 at Future of Imagination (Singapore, 2012), Toàn lay on the floor, propelling himself forward by sliding his body toward the audience, a cigarette lodged in his navel; Song hurled ink-soaked rice against the wall, the grains rebounding sharply; An dragged a bucket of black water, its handle tethered with a rubber strip.

15. The kettle recurs in Toàn’s work. Its high-pitched whistle carries a sense of emergency, almost anxious. In the performance Three Perimeters, the duration of the piece was determined by the time it took for the water to boil.

16. Ibid 

17.  Somniloquy 2. In the last month of the lunar year, peach blossoms for Tết. Đức rinses his mouth with honey, spits into a spittoon. Bắc whips the stone dog. An walks across the spread-out clothes of Đăng.

18. The five gates of the city greet the returning troops,
like a blooming flower with five peach-pink petals,
glistening in the early morning dew.

We replant the faded blooms of days long past—
oh, beloved old streets of Hanoi!
Tomorrow’s flowers await to welcome the future in our hands,
as life's springtime smiles and sings again.

A phrase from “Marching towards Hanoi”—a song by Văn Cao composed to celebrate Hanoi’s liberation from French colonial rule on October 10, 1954 became the title of Phụ Lục’s 2016 performance at four of the city’s old gates. Once vital gateways into the imperial citadel of Thăng Long, these gates are not merely coordinates on a map; they stand as enduring symbols of victory, pride, and pivotal moments in the nation’s history. Of the five historic city gates, only Ô Quan Chưởng has retained its original form; the others survive merely as place names, their physical structures long erased. Amid the jubilant echoes of history, in the early morning of October 10, 2016, Huy An sipped French red wine at Chợ Dừa Gate; Bắc cast a plumb line at Cầu Dền Gate; Song flung black-inked grains of rice into the air toward Đống Mác Gate; and Toàn inflated balloons with an oxygen tank at Thanh Bảo Gate.

• Hai sỏi một cát nửa bao xi măng (two [baskets of] gravels, one [basket of] sand, half a bag of cement)
• Bài học nông nghiệp: Nhất nước nhì phân tam cần tứ giống (Agricultural lesson: first water, second manure, third diligence, fourth cultivar) 
• Mơ nói (Somniloquy)
• Phụ Lục through whose eyes?
• Phụ Lục, how are you?

19. Two [baskets of] gravels, one [basket of] sand, and half a bag of cement was once the standard mix for pouring concrete ceilings in residential homes, a method now long replaced by modern practices. In the cramped elevator of Hanoi Creative City—where Nhà Sàn Collective once occupied the 15th floor—An, Toàn, and Bắc stood half-naked, each balancing on their head and shoulder a basket of gravel, a basket of sand, and a bag of cement. On the 15th floor, Song sat tallying the labor: each time the elevator doors opened, he counted one unit of work.   

20. This proverb underscores the need to balance these elements for a successful harvest, reflecting the agricultural knowledge and experience of the Vietnamese people. On the small stage at the Japan Foundation Hanoi in 2012, as part of Nhà Sàn Collective’s Skyline with Flying People 2, in the Phụ Lục room: the floor is cut open, An stands with mud on his head; a ladder reaches the ceiling, Toàn climbs and sprays mist onto the lights; Song lies across the stage, a hoe clenched in his mouth; a TV plays footage of Đức sharpening a sickle.

21. Since 2011, Phụ Lục has been sleeptalking. In 2018, Somniloquy 11 unfolded as if only a sleep away from Somniloquy 7. Restaging the setting of Somniloquy 7—abruptly halted by a police visit—the performance presented thirty‑five mats flipped to conceal their patterns and stacked to knee height; a long table with betel pulp, its fibers plucked individually with tweezers and unraveled into threads; a small jar; and a live turtle fitted with a fabricated crane. Time seemed to stop. In a single flash of light, Phụ Lục—now reduced to three members—appeared seated on the wooden platform, their beards long and their hair silvered with age.

22. This title originated from Phụ Lục’s playful rephrasing of the documentary film Hà Nội trong mắt ai? (Hanoi through whose eyes?) directed by Trần Văn Thuỷ in 1983, coined during one of the first conversations between them and me that led to the Phụ Lục Project. The title Phụ Lục through whose eyes? later became the official title of one chapter of the exhibition curated by myself, through which Phụ Lục granted me the freedom to look at their practice from my own perspective and to reconstruct it within the exhibition format.

23. “How are you?” is a casual, almost automatic question people ask when they meet. It was also how Phụ Lục responded to my invitation to develop an exhibition of newly commissioned works to mark the fifteenth anniversary of their collective practice. For them, the exhibition needed to reflect the most honest and unvarnished state of Phụ Lục as it exists in 2025. Phụ Lục, How Are You? eventually became the second part of the exhibition, in which the artists turned a critical gaze on themselves as they entered their forties.

• Phụ Lục: Those 15 years