Vân-Nhi Nguyễn takes interest in documentary photography and seeks to bring fresh approaches to the field. Through overlooked places and individuals, she reconstructs collective memories, both personal and societal. Examining the role of memory as a bridge between society’s desire to reshape geographies and its rigid history, she questions its nature: is it fact, and when can we believe memory?

Conversations about Vietnam often disregard the country’s complex history and reality and are typically reduced to two war-torn decades or its current manufacturing hub status. To challenge existing perceptions of Vietnamese people, we must be able to see and understand the unruliness of it: there is an excess of memories bestowed physically across the country, some given prominence through statues or architecture, others left to obliteration, and all becoming vessels for memories.

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