SNEAKY WEEK (2007)

What is often considered the first performance art event in Vietnam, Văn Miếu Event (1997) by Nguyễn Văn Tiến and Trần Anh Quân, was staged in a public space, the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, a well-known historical site with a complex cultural legacy. it was an arguably showy performance that thrived on controversies, so much so that after almost three decades, people in the field only reference it because it was the first of its kind. No one really bothers to recall what the artists actually did. There is a tendency, a kind of cultural inertia, to regard ‘firsts’ as inherently important. Sometimes, that importance can prove itself to be meaningless. On one side of the Temple of Literature, where the neatly arranged rows of trees and trimmed lawns stand, two artists played with colors in a careless, unruly way, producing hues that scream and contort with a superficial sense of rebellion. What does that fake blood color mean, other than the artists’ desire to show that they are trying to depict real blood with paint? In the end, what remains is a battlefield of paint, canvas, and splatter—anything can be hung up, just to fill out the empty space with more emptiness. The artists tied themselves up, and a few people exclaimed, “Oh, freedom!” 

There was another performance that was not considered a first, but was still rather significant. It took place within the conservative and outdated environment of the Vietnam University of Fine Arts. In 1995, Amanda Heng worked with a group of students, and they staged a performance right there in the classroom. Everything gathered around simple acts and bodily presence. The materials were ordinary, drawn from the space itself: desks, chairs, chalks, tapes, all accompanied the gestures that the participants performed that day. It opened up new ways of seeing, ones that did not have to manifest through loud, bizarre, or shocking gestures, as some of the early skeptics of this new art form had assumed.

Despite this early guerrilla spirit, many performance art events in Vietnam took place at a few familiar venues, such as the Nhà Sàn Studio, which became a cradle for many performance artists later on. Then there were the foreign cultural centers belonging to Germany, France, Japan, and the UK, and others that fostered international exchange. The first international performance art event in Vietnam, Lim Dim, was also held in 2004 across a number of such spaces as the Goethe-Institut, Ryllega Gallery, Bến Bạc, and VCX Farm in Hòa Bình. In 2010, the first edition of In:Act, an international performance art festival, was held at Nhà Sàn Studio. Since then, it has become one of the most consistent and enduring gatherings of within Vietnam’s contemporary art scene (the most recent In: Act, its 13th edition, took place in 2022 at Á Space). In 2015, the event From – To marked a memorable season of performance art, serving as the inaugural program for Nhà Sàn Collective at Hanoi Creative City, while its format posed a new kind of conceptual challenge for artists: to remain constantly present throughout a performance moving from one place to another place. It introduced a durational process, anchored by a predetermined starting point, with the journey itself bearing witness to everything unfolding between “to” and “from”. In recent years, Hanoi’s performance art scene has grown even more diverse, notably with Ping Pong, an international performance art event organized by APD Art Center, which has become a sustained and significant platform for performance art in the city.

In the broader context of contemporary art in Vietnam, Sneaky Week (2007) stands out as a distinct performance art project that occurred during a specific period. At the time, there was a certain filtration from the previous generation of practitioners who were the first in Vietnam to use performance art as a medium. The process of filtration (more precisely, self-filtration) can be situated amidst the flooding into Vietnam of various forms, methods, and media of contemporary art in the 1990s. The first generation of artists to confront the flood had to receive this new information and, at the same time, practice and communicate it. There were no exceptions. Everyone had to go through almost every medium—performance, installation, video art, etc. However, not everyone had to excel at or love all of these mediums. Especially with performance, many people experimented with it only a few times to understand its nature, but found they were more suited to and specialized in other mediums. Only after this initial process did a tiny number of Vietnamese performance artists emerge who placed performance as the core medium of their practice. This lack of practitioners provided an important background for my younger generation as we began to focus on performance art. Crowds and controversies generated initial curiosity, but they did not have real efficacy for the people who wanted to learn something from performance. Once again, a wave of young artists began creating performances but this trend decreased over time, leaving only a few who truly loved and were suited for it. During that period, performance art existed mainly in the form of public programming events. It often happened in the evening at some cultural centers or specific art spaces. It was difficult to shift this convention and format. Objectively speaking, these opportunities meant that the way things were unfolding for contemporary performance art were already quite good. Yet, for the courageous few, good is still not enough.

Phạm Đức Tùng is a remarkable peer artist. In 2006, Tùng and I had just attended the 14th International Performance Art Conference in Da Lat, where we witnessed a diversity of artistic methods and approaches from around the world.  Upon returning to Hanoi, with a free spirit and an innate courage, Tùng almost immediately started nurturing the idea of creating a performance art project that would take place in public spaces, rather than relying on familiar venues like cultural centers or art galleries. The project soon became Sneaky Week. Why the name? Simply because of the censorship system in Vietnam. It would be too troublesome to go through the process of asking for permits from the government. It did not have to be an art event. And if it were to take place in public spaces, then the artist would have to know how to sneak around the policing structure to make it happen. The familiar event format usually concentrated on one evening, but we planned to sustain one long breath so that the performances could be dispersed throughout the week. As young artists full of enthusiasm, we mobilized very quickly under the banner of Phạm Đức Tùng. His ambition was not limited to Hanoi where we lived, but it spread throughout northern, central, and southern Vietnam. Around thirty young artists participated, and the project extended beyond the confine of a single week.

The key point to understand is that our goal was not to organize performances in public space as opposed to cultural institutions. In order for Sneaky Week to actualize, there could be no events. Each artist could perform outside in a square, on the streets, in a shop, in nature, next to a train or bus station, in the park, or elsewhere, as long as they were quiet and sneaky about it. No one could intentionally know that they were an audience member, aside from a possible photographer or videographer. That was the ideal. But in reality, a few artists did tell their friends and acquaintances about where their performances would take place. If unlucky, these friends and acquaintances would drag along their own friends and acquaintances. 

At that time, we were not, as young artists, familiar with the notion of site specificity. Yet, I firmly believe that site specificity was present in many performances. You had to develop a sensitivity to the site if you were to do something sneaky and guerrilla in public space.

We need to emphasize what we meant by sneakiness—it was the crucial distinction that set us apart from what was happening in the otherwise vibrant contemporary art scene. We were interested in the elements of blending in, intermingling, and infiltrating everyday life, generating tension so minor that it barely registered as anything. There was no spotlight for the artist. Whatever occurred at the site was not necessarily for the art community, per usual. No spectators, no insiders, no art enthusiasts—only those who happened to be there, who passed through, who may have performed, unknowingly, for a fleeting moment. There was no one with a microphone introducing the artist and announcing the start of a performance. There was also no applause when the performance ended. Everyone was to stay tidy and discreet, swiftly exiting the scene once the work was complete. 

During the same period, right before or after Sneaky Week, there were a few events happening in public spaces. However, they were still the same type of art events that happened outdoors instead of inside. With Sneaky Week, after several weeks of sneaking around, all that was left were archival materials—videos and photos capturing what had occurred. Documentation always has its limitations—what was truly alive may never fully reveal itself. And in a way, art lives precisely through that impossibility, that inherent imperfection. It grows organically out of those gaps. Out of the hearsay, the whispered stories that something happened in that place, at that moment. And isn’t that, once again, the rare luxury of art? Even Phạm Đức Tùng himself knew very little about the performances that took place during the project. He could only access the same limited collection of documentation. Nevertheless, that was what felt alive, emerging in suspension over those several sneaking weeks. All of the documentation was later compiled and shown in a final screening. It was only then that people from the art scene and art lovers got to see what had transpired and how it all unfolded. Though ultimately, it merely fulfilled the task of displaying documentation. It fell short of what one might expect from a meaningful exhibition. 

Sneaky Week remains an illuminating case study. In a few recent presentations, Trần Lương, a prominent figure in Vietnam’s contemporary art scene, has brought up some compelling observations. For instance, he critiques the limitation of the contemporary art space or gallery, the so-called ‘white cube’, as a form of lifeless and generic space without history, without soul. In addition, I believe another question must be asked: Are performance artists themselves prepared for such a space? To me, the issue lies not with the space itself, but instead with what each space demands of the artist who must look into their own motivations, desires, and particularities, to explore how each physical environment can correspond to and be adapted for various ideas and practices. The white cube can always be someone’s natural habitat. What feels unrealistic is when an artist proclaims: I am used to working site-specifically and responding to particular histories and contexts, so I do not know how to work with generic spaces. That statement demonstrates a narrow-mindedness and inadaptability, an either/or instance of ‘picky eating’.

Some organizers, to avoid the difficulties of social realities, often retreat to remote locations with trees and nature, places that evoke a sense of meditation, easily connecting with the moon and the wind. This approach risks distancing the work from the vibrant pressures of real life. In contrast, Trần Lương supports approaches that do not avoid but instead confront places filled with unpredictable pressures, where organizers risk getting bruised and battered, where things are always on the verge of going wrong, where your heart pounds like a drum as the event unfolds. Such undertakings demand a heroic level of courage and integrity. If they do exist, they are exceedingly rare. Sneaky Week might be one of the few projects that is asymptotic to that ideal, but if I am fully honest, I do not believe it quite measures up to that level. Perhaps from the beginning, it was never intended to raise the flag of confrontation to do something edgy. To dare to do something modest is a kind of bravery in itself, refusing to let noise and spectacle compromise what needs to flow quietly beneath the surface. In that sense, being sneaky comes quite close to that ideal.

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I will end this essay with a quote from a conversation that took place at the home of artist Huy An, right after we had just wrapped up a small workshop for a few artists. The person who asked us (Phuluc) was none other than Nguyễn Thị Diệp, a rising performance artist in Vietnam, who is also Huy An’s wife. She asked us, “What really is the essence of performance art?” We replied with: “The truth. Something real has to happen inside the performance artist. If nothing truly happens from within, everything you do will feel shaky. And it shows, clearly, even from the outside.”