Trần Lương interviewed by Thanh-Mai Bui-Duy

Thanh-Mai Bui-Duy: Performance wasn’t your starting point, yet it plays an important role in your practice. How did that journey begin?

Trần Lương: In the very beginning, getting into contemporary art—with its ephemeral nature and constant transformation—was a way to break free from object art. Paintings and sculptures, being physical in nature, often get caught in layers of censorship. The red tape was endlessly frustrating: one stamp from cultural censorship, and another from customs for temporary export and re-import. It meant high costs, headaches, and endless paperwork. And then I realized how naive I was. I had done something purely out of love, sincerity, and care—but people twisted it, interpreted it in the worst way, assuming there was some dangerous hidden agenda behind it. That’s when I really saw the darker side of life. It’s incredibly unjust, cruel, and just plain awful. It’s stupid. And this stupidity, it’s systemic, it governs our lives. That’s why, when I first encountered contemporary art, it felt like this is freedom. This is power. It felt like the borders were expanding. Then, when I started doing performance. My body was everything—the brush, the paper, the canvas, the critique, the dictionary, all of it. The physical materials of my object art used to weigh between 30-32 kilos at their lightest, crammed into one overloaded suitcase. But now it’s just—boom—gone, and I’m on my way. A playful image comes to mind: just me in boxers, and I’m good to go. I’ve got everything on me—my brain, my skin, and flesh. That’s all I need.

TMBD: And in reality, is performance art truly immune to censorship?

TL: The word “immune” is extreme, because immunity doesn’t exist in reality. But the spirit of immunity, yes, that exists. Especially when compared with other art forms, because performance creates the possibility of doing something even under the most difficult circumstances. Even under heavy censorship. Even when standing in front of government officials, one can still perform.

TMBD: So, did you choose performance out of circumstance, just as a way to avoid censorship? What does performance mean to you?

TL: It’s not just about external censorship. Performance also frees you from that internal state of self-censorship, when your mind keeps choosing what feels safe. That kind of self-censorship can be terrifying. Performance is an experimental art form with exceptional power, one that can overcome a whole range of barriers.

First, it’s an art medium that can break through the barriers of formal education and social conditioning. It has the power to awaken not only the working class with little schooling, but also people across all social strata, from everyday individuals to intellectuals and politicians.

Second, it addresses the inequalities of access to materials, which is tied to wealth. Because performance isn’t bound to academic materials, it’s also not constrained by the rigid rules of the ivory tower. And it’s precisely those standards—in practice, when both body and mind are locked into formal conventions—that often kill off spontaneity, the expansion of language, and a sense of liberation.

Performance doesn’t require a site or fixed setting. It’s a highly flexible body that always responds to its context. It is inherently site-specific. Performance art solves many infrastructural constraints. That’s a kind of breakthrough, a creative revolution. It generates freedom. Academia is like carrying a heavy rock on your back. To break away from the academic isn’t to destroy art—it’s a process of liberation, of opening up virtually without boundaries.

TMBD: In your practice, how do you know when a performance is ‘done’? Can it ever be done?

TL: In essence, a performance is never truly done. “Done” here should be understood as a matter of phases. A performance piece, and I say this from my own approach, is always ongoing. Each time you perform the same work, it takes place in a new context: different emotional states, different social or environmental conditions, different timing, different site-specific dynamics. Even internally, I’m always changing. I'm sixty-five now, and in all those years there hasn’t been two days where my body was identical on a biophysiological level —what I ate, how I thought, how I matured, what I felt. It all fluctuates endlessly. And performance reflects those changes, so it can't ever be fixed as complete.

In postmodern and contemporary art, the notion of something being truly finished no longer holds. And the world just keeps shifting faster and faster. We're constantly being warned. “Shit, that’s wrong! Fuck, it’s changed again.” Another rupture.  Another oh-no-not-again moment. The definitions you thought you had? They don’t quite hold anymore. It’s like trying to grip a spinning gear. You turn it, and it slips. You adjust, and it slips again. Nothing can stay fixed. In the end, there is still a kind of finished, but it’s only a temporary one. It’s the kind of done-ness that comes from the exhaustion of a biological body, or the interruption of systems, governments, or nature itself, when something or someone simply no longer has the conditions to continue. It’s that kind of done.

TMBD: You’ve always expressed a desire to bring art closer to the public. But at the same time, you choose to work with performance, a medium that can be hard to grasp. Do you see this as a contradiction?

TL: That’s something I’ve tried to resolve from the very beginning. Most common approaches to performance art focus on creating a powerful visual spectacle, crafting an image meant to register in the face of history, in front of the public. And the hope is that certain ‘receivers’ — nature, people, scholars, journalists, and so on — will pick up on something and that the message might be successfully interpreted. I don’t reject that method, but I choose to work differently. In my approach, performance needs to be something that spreads, that breaks through regional and social barriers like poverty, lack of academic training, or limited access to art. So, then, how do ordinary people, across the spectrum, even the wealthy or politicians, actually digest performance art like this?

That’s why I work with interactive performance. My view is to hand the act of performance over to the participants and to minimize performing myself. I believe my presence is a performance, but I don’t carry out the actions. The key is to spark interest. Otherwise, you just stand there and people say, “This guy’s nuts,” or “It’s too hot out, maybe he’s just lost it,” or “Did something happen to him?” So how do you deliver the message in a way that people actually engage with it instead of walking away, right? That’s the real challenge of interactive performance. Once you crack that, the anxiety around academic knowledge begins to loosen. It opens a door so that newcomers, even if just for a moment, can start to engage. And little by little, they begin to see the layers within performance.

Take Lập Lòe (2012) for example. I handed the performance over to the participants so they could understand the human experience and our existential conditions. The understanding of art would come later. They learned, through interaction, that when I hit him, I understand what it feels like to be hurt, that by taking on the role of the one who inflicts pain, you gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be in pain. You remember the beatings from your childhood, the ones from your parents. You understand war differently. You understand oppression of class, of power. And if you’ve ever been the oppressor, if you’ve ever hit someone, you start to understand that, too. The point is that, at each moment of contact, people will receive something. And the act of passing on the gesture of performance, that in itself means something has been received. How much they take in, and how to address what remains unclear—that’s the role of education. But if we stick to the old form—creating a spectacle and waiting for people to understand — then yes, it becomes exactly what you were asking about, hard to grasp, and difficult for the public to access.

Each audience, each social class or knowledge base needs a different mode of performance, a different way to give and receive, and to share and engage without words. Dialogue can happen through the eyes, through touch, through remorse, through crying. Many people hit me and then cried, or apologized, or invited me out for food and drinks. Then they asked for time to explain but I said, there’s nothing to explain. “Do you know that the moment you hit me and I felt the most pain was also the moment I felt I had succeeded? Something in you made you strike that hard—do you even know what that was?” They’d pause. “Ah…I get it.” I’m quite extreme when I say: use less text. Because we already have a whole universe of other tools and languages. And they can burn through what would’ve taken pages of A4 paper to explain. As for the message of performance, without the right context, it’s hard to fully grasp. Art isn’t instant education.

TMBD: You’ve spoken often about community, not only in your artworks, but also in your own social development practices. How do you define your approach to community? And is there such a thing as an artist’s responsibility to society?

TL: The very nature of creativity, of being an artist, is rooted in the community. I want to use both my art and my social practice to create something akin to religion, but one that’s secular. That is, something that can help address deep frustrations. When people can’t resolve injustice or poverty, they can still find beauty in life under different conditions. So, we have to show poor people that the rich also carry immense misfortunes, and that the rich are lacking in things the poor actually have in abundance, though they may not realize it. It’s a kind of service—almost missionary in spirit—but carried out through the secular methods of an artist.

I’m not a thinker trying to create some kind of educational doctrine, and I believe that in a world changing as chaotically as this one, being a thinker in that sense is a mistake. Trying to guide society through purely educational means is also a mistake, because no single program or framework can fit the complexity of the world we’re living in now. When people are equally vulnerable before harsh Mother Nature, I try to create a kind of secular cushion using art, thought, and material practice, in whatever way I can, to bring about awareness, a way to recognize the value of life.

I’m not claiming to bring material wealth. I’m not here to offer systemic change or policy reform, like a politician might. All the projects I’ve done weren’t meant to improve material life. They were, in fact, part of a long process to shift people’s awareness. And once that shift happened, they came to trust me. They’ll begin to have a new way of seeing their own lives. They might look at a tree and recognize values in it that are entirely different from before, when they only saw it in material terms. They won’t kill an insect that flies past. They won’t kill a deer or a muntjac anymore. They’ll begin to recognize the richness of simply witnessing such a creature pass through their village and how that, in itself, can be a good thing.

TMBD: It seems you've always chosen to act. Have you ever chosen silence or stillness? 

TL: Silence or stillness isn’t really my style. But the issue here isn’t about being silent or still, it’s more about being aware of the situation. I’ve never truly been silent, never truly inactive, but if there’s a short period where one needs to be situationally aware, then it should be so. Because if you speak or act recklessly during a volatile moment—whether in society, politics, or collective psychology—it’s like pouring gasoline out in 60-degree-Celsius heat. 

What’s needed isn’t finesse, it’s knowing how to go the distance. There are things I chose to speak about only ten years later, because it simply wasn’t the right time back then. Even though I had every right to speak, and was completely in the right, speaking at the wrong time wouldn’t have changed anything. People couldn’t have understood or corrected it, because the social awareness, the lessons of interaction, just weren’t there yet, and society hadn’t opened up enough for people to even recognize whether it was right or wrong. Ten years later, I just had to say it and people immediately recognized, “Oh, that was wrong.” But back then, it was so common that no one questioned it. So, that ten-year delay? It wasn’t foolish, and it didn’t cost too much. That silence was well-placed. It needed to be in the right place to be effective. Art takes a long time to be understood. Some works of art take a hundred, two hundred, even five hundred years to be fully grasped. So, there’s no need to rush.

TMBD: Going the distance, is that something you want to pass on?

TL: I always say it’s important to learn how to run long distances. It’s a broad idea. A 100-meter sprint is one thing, but a marathon requires constant adjustment, knowing where the slope is steep, how to pace yourself under the sun, how to shorten your stride so you don’t slip and lose momentum.  On solid ground, you stretch your stride. Hold back, you fall behind. So, running long distances is really about your attitude towards unfavorable circumstances. 

TMBD: Would you say this mindset is a survival skill you’ve developed in response to life’s barriers?

TL: Not something I had to force myself to learn. It’s more that I came to cherish and accept life as it is. Neither positive nor negative, just something that is. The notion of fate always rings true, if you live positively. Fate is like a default setting we must calmly accept and care for over time. And fate is strange. No one has a truly normal fate, not even those who seem most ordinary.

TMBD: Your practice is incredibly diverse. Art historian Phoebe Scott once observed that your community activities together could be seen as part of one “big performance.”  Speaking personally—as once a student in your Tầm Tã [soaked in the long rain] course—I also felt that the way you facilitated the course resembled a performance more than a conventional, syllabus-based class. Do you see your artistic and social practices as part of one continuous thread, or as separate pieces?

TL: In truth, this is a profound challenge. How do you make every moment of your life a performance so that you're always within the act of performing, not just performing in designated moments or settings? When you live performatively—integrating behavior, attitude, and spirit—others begin to see beyond the words you say.