Young Birds, Youngbloods, and Shameless Shamans from Strange Mountains: Curators Thảo Hồ and Hải Nam Nguyễn with artist Việt Lê on Southeast Asian spiritualities & sexualities

Thảo Hồ: This is a snippet of a conversation that I had with curator Hải Nam Nguyễn and artist Việt Lê at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. We talk about spirituality and artistic practices, shamanism and queerness, or the concept of queerness. 

It is March 19, 2025 in the afternoon and we are in room number four, the workshop room. We just had a tour through the exhibition. Can you introduce yourselves?

Việt Lê: I'm Việt Lê, artist, researcher, shaman. And it's fitting that we're in room number four because in Asia, four signals death, and the show at the Schwules gestures at that.  There are some works about death and transition, woven with spirituality and sexuality.

Hải Nam Nguyễn: I'm Nam and I'm a co-curator of the Young Bird from Strange Mountains exhibition, which is currently on at the Schwules Museum until August 2025. The exhibition is curated by Thảo Hồ, Sarnt Utamachote, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Ragil Huda, and myself.

In this exhibition, we ask ourselves: What does it mean to be queer and Southeast Asian? And what does it mean for us as queer people, as queer Southeast Asians living in diaspora in Europe, and, more specifically, in Germany? With that, we started to dig into the ancestral and pre-colonial knowledges about spiritual practices. These practices, as well as the knowledge around them, were often erased during colonial times. In this exhibition, we dig into a lot of this knowledge that not many of us have known, or which was reinterpreted or misunderstood within the contemporary context.

There's a huge archive as part of the exhibition that gets all the knowledge of communities together from all over the diaspora here in Germany, as well as from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. There's a collection of Indonesian and Thai queer and erotic magazines. There’s also the archive of a queer museum project by Nhung Đinh, an artist in Vietnam, and the queer Indonesian archive, now located between Indonesia and Australia. 

VL: You both have argued with academics and researchers that we are complicit. There's often this misunderstanding that LGBTQI+ queer movements are seen as a Western neoliberal movement, right? That this movement has been exported from “the West” to “the Rest”. That one is expected to come out of the closet and subscribe to the highly legible discourse of representation and the politics of visibility. But in the show, you argue that this kind of knowledge, or queer being, has always existed within ‘traditional’ cultures, within performance or ritual performance. You two are both working with the archives and with living artists, that's a queer kind of ritual of care and kin—can you talk more to that? 

HNN: From a personal perspective, firstly, I cannot really find myself in these kinds of debates or the topic of our queerness here in Germany. For example, with this whole debate about pronouns, which I of course totally respect and think is necessary, but. Is always about categorizing and putting people in a box. I started to ask myself: What is really important in Vietnam? What are the real issues that we need to face? Was it about labeling ourselves or is it about just having as normal a life as anybody else? And was it ever about being loud and colorful? Loud and proud—was it ever really about that? Or is it something that just happened a few years back when the whole queer movement from the West came to Vietnam? 

Of course, it is also necessary for it to happen; it needs to happen. But the question is, can we apply everything that's happening here to a very different social context? And when we bring this debate to our country, how can we run it? How can we discuss it? Because it's obvious that we don't have the same understanding or the same cultural background as Germany or the US, so how things run is totally different. Especially when we are in a country that's faced with censorship, or like in Indonesia that's faced with restriction from religion, you cannot bring these kinds of issues and just be loud and proud. There are also safety issues for the people who do this there. So, my question is more about how we can do that in a totally different context and social background without harming and exposing communities there. 

TH:  I asked Nhung Đinh, the person who is running a queer museum in Hà Nội: what do all the lesbians do in Hà Nội? (laughs) Like, is there any party or where do I meet them? And she said, they just talk with their cats. I was like, actually, that's also my vibe. And then I told her here in Berlin, there are also not that many lesbian or queer bars, but there are some where you can meet people. However, in Vietnam, or in Hanoi more specifically, she said it's way more private. I found what you said about expectations of being loud and proud really interesting because it is also a typical image that the Global North associates with activism. Activists are expected to be really loud on the streets, which is also quite ableist. So, I went into the curation with this question: How do we find peace within ourselves? Not only through community, but also, where do we see ourselves, beyond these Western concepts and identities? 

VL: I like this question of inner peace and outer public activism. (By the way, in Saigon, there's a lesbian snail snack street shop). The inner peace / outer activism dyad is an arbitrary one. Oftentimes, we think in terms of binaries, like sexuality and spirituality; inner peace is separate from outer activism. What blew my mind about the show is the lack of identitarian positioning. Having done a lot of my research and education in the West, there's very much this Cartesian duality: the mind / body split, right? Whether you do activism outwardly or sometimes in different Southeast Asian countries, they use this Western framework, such as with pride parades. I'll use Singapore as an example. As a nerd, I'll name-drop my friend, Eng-Beng Lim. He has this book called Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias. He argues that some countries like Singapore, the policies of which are otherwise draconian, use these pride parades and the pink dollar to basically serve as a facade. We’re neoliberal, we're progressive, we have queer rights, which ends up masking other state policies. 

Again, what blew my mind about the show was that this idea of queerness, and these practices already existed, without wanting to be essentializing, long before this neocolonial  discourse has been implanted upon the rest of the world and framed it as “behind” or backwards.  

HNN: A huge part of the show is about looking back at these spiritual practices and religious stories from pre-colonial times. I also had to thank you for inspiring me a lot to look at this whole Mother Goddess religion and its history. I do know that all these practices are often led by queer people. And these people used to have a very important role in society back then.

At some point, everything turned backwards in a way that this practice was seen as superstitious and was forbidden until the 1980s. Of course, if it weren't in the process of being recognized by UNESCO as a heritage, the Mother Goddess religion wouldn't be seen today as a recognized culture in Vietnam… And now we're seeing how these religions and spiritual practices are being used in contemporary contexts. And it's also a part of the exhibition, which is how they're being capitalized and monetized by the state. If you go to Vietnam, you will see a thousand churches and temples being built for the sake of spiritual tourism. Even the Mother Goddess religion, which was once banned until the 1980s, is now seeing a revival. Suddenly, there were TV shows and films about it. They produced a whole drama series about the Mother Goddess religion. 

VL: There's a Vietnamese television series about a shaman, called Land of Spirits: The Young Shaman. Youngbloods and mudbloods, in Harry Potter parlance. This franchise also had two or three movies, mainly about shamanism, titled The Blind Shaman and sequels. They’re dramedies about a family of exorcists, not necessarily from the Mother Goddess religion, but with very similar rituals. The lead actor Huyen Lap is openly gay. He's not gay per se in the series, but he's out and about in real life.

HNN: Speaking of that, we refer to queer people in Vietnamese as đồng bóng. In my town when I was growing up, it was always used as an insult toward gay people. And now, kind of like going back home, people inside the community call ourselves bóng, which can mean many things, like shadow or shine or balloon. We kind of regained the power of these words. Also, the original meaning of this word is "they don't go down," it means a shaman. 

TH: Việt, you mentioned in your introduction that you're also a shaman. Would you like to talk a little bit about that and how it connects to your artwork?  

VL: I guess I ‘came out’ as a shaman for a solo performance at Headlands Center for the Arts, entitled Việt Namaste. As my friend jokes, she can’t tell whether I put the sham in shaman, or shameless in shaman. I put the monk-ey mind in monk. A lot of my work has to do with music, and in hindsight, channeling. The work I have in the show is framed around golden music, nhạc vàng. My current practice also encompasses music. By the way, I feel Mother Goddess has now hit mainstream in Vietnam. There's this A-list pop singer, Hoàng Thùy Linh, who has a song called “Tứ Phủ,” which you can see on YouTube. The video has about 14 million views. In the video, basically, she's enacting these rituals with a hip-hop breakdown interlude. And in the art world, shamanism, or spirituality, at least, is also trending. Before there was much more of a divide. There are a lot of shaman TV shows on US streaming platforms, or Korean shows about mudang. 

But in my own practice, as I said, I came out as a shaman. It started off first as research. I was a research assistant for Janet Hoskins, who was researching Cao Dai about 15, 20 years ago.  She first started researching Mother Goddess.  I went to temples with Professor Hoskins to translate. Afterwards, I always thought, why is it so cozy and cruisy in here? (laughs) Why are they asking me to come back? And then, back in the day, I thought about this divide, between it being a temple and them hitting on me. (laughs) And then years later, I realized, of course, there are no binaries. 

I did my PhD, and did research mainly about art history and anthropology in Southeast Asia. And through art, I started making work about trauma and representation, which was really the first part of my life. My first academic book, Return Engagements, is on trauma and popular culture. Hence, my interest in pop music and the pop songs that I made. And then, the second part of my life really becomes about spirituality and sexuality, because I was really ill. In Korean, it's called sinbyeong, which is "shaman sickness". In Vietnamese, in my film, it's căn, which means "root". So, you have mystery ailments, either physical or mental illness, and I asked other people about how they got better and how they healed.

My question was: Is illness actually an initiation? Is illness an opening? I argue that it is. A thing about the show is this idea about knowing. Because you're working with the archives, what do we know, and how do we know? And now we're talking about these categories and that's, again, a very Cartesian, colonial, and capitalist reasoning. You have to categorize, so you commoditize. Categorize, commoditize. But there are other ways of knowing, or not knowing. So, you think you know something, you think you know yourself. I think, therefore I am. This is a kind of Cartesian framing. But then, what about other embodied forms of knowing, and also ancestral knowledge? And so, the second half of my life is really about Global South shamanisms, or global traditional healing wisdom, which I think takes on different forms. This knowledge is not citational, it’s neither about quoting nor authority. It’s more of an embodied, ancestral, magical knowledge. Yes, there's a lot of research, because I'm studying Chinese traditional medicine, and there are these ancient texts. 

Arguably, Mother Goddess is Vietnam’s oldest religion from the 16th century or earlier. So, my research, my art practice, and my spiritual practice are all, I feel, the same. I do ritual performances, which look like karaoke. (laughs) But I call it QUÊer-aoke. 

So, back to this idea of knowing, I'm interested in your practice: as you engage with these different artists and archives, how has your idea of knowledge shifted? 

TH: When I started to engage with the archive at the Schwules Museum Berlin, I went in with the intention to find something. But then, I thought, okay, why do I always expect an archive to house something that represents me? What do I miss while I spend my time criticizing what is absent? 

At some point, it was really liberating to say, when we talk about physical archives, we are just talking about that one room with some objects. I realized that there is agency to contribute to an archive, if we wish to have a physical space. And even if not, the archive in itself is limitless if we think about it beyond walls.

My strategy has always been to start something and then let it loose, accepting that there will always be things that I will never be able to fully explain or understand. I think this is captured really nicely by the sonic materials in the exhibition. Sound can hold feelings that you cannot put into words sometimes. It carries so much that refuses to be fully archived. So, I’m interested in this refusal rather than producing an archive just for consumption. 

I was thinking about visibility, and what materials can and cannot do. I also don’t understand everything in the exhibition myself but by engaging with the artists and materials I was confronted with the various ways stories can be told and preserved. Yesterday, there was this researcher who came to see the show, and then they were like, “You know, not everything’s explained.” But then I thought this was actually a theoretical point that you don’t have to. It’s intentional that you don’t explain everything. 

VL: Derrida says the archive is filled with violence, and other post-colonial theorists say the whole point is not to explicate. But maybe you had another thing you wanted to say? 

HNN: I also agree with you. But from my position, it's more about unlearning the knowledge, the way of doing research that I have learned from the past 13-14 years of living and studying here in Germany. When you discover all this knowledge, the first thing that I realized was that I cannot really access this knowledge with the attitude that I was having. For example, when you read this whole fable story or this religious story, you can find a way to understand it in a Western academic way. But in the end, I had the feeling that if I do that, I will reduce everything. I will lose this essence or the lesson of the stories. So this is just a way for me to unlearn when it comes to this kind of knowledge that I'm engaging for the exhibition. 

Funded by the European Union (ERC, TODO, ID: 101043907). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.