- Title:
- Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories
- Author:
- Anador Walsh
- Date:
- 18.06.26
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
Anador Walsh (AW): I’d like to start by providing audiences with some context on your practice at large. In my research, I found that your practice is described as sitting at the intersection of choreography, live art and healing and your areas of concern are said to be personal-political stories and queer identity in relationship with Vietnamese culture and history. Are you able to expand for me on both your choreographic/performance practice and the concepts you explore in your work?
Chung Nguyen (CN): My practice is always ongoing and changing. It started in 2017 when I was based more in Saigon, Vietnam. That’s key for me, before I turned 27 (in 2017) I worked with dance companies in Singapore and Switzerland. So, when I was younger it was all about technique. I was spending eight hours per day in the studio. But then I reached a point where I wanted to develop my own choreographic thinking and my body started to refuse what was being imposed. I was really fed up with that way of dancing—which was quite classical—but I didn’t know how to begin developing my own thinking. So, in 2017 I started to consider how I could still perform without dancing, which led me to performance art.
I did a lot of research. I read about Marina Abramović and watched a lot of videos online of performance artists in the US in the 1970s. I learned that through performance art, I could do actions with normal objects, usually domestic ones. Also, in Vietnam it’s really hard to get funding to perform in a theater, because there’s only really funding for government companies (in theatre and dance). This also required me to change my practice, so that I could make work more often, but with less money. That led me to making work in the gallery with friends and becoming a part of a community of experimental artists in Vietnam who were performing in a group or in the street, rather than a theater.
My practice now is less dancing and more intuitive. It’s an interaction with objects and a response to the conditions of living in Vietnam. In the contemporary dance scene in Vietnam at the time, a lot of dancers had the idea that if you’re a dancer, you have to dance in your performances, you have to move to show the techniques you know. But I was experimenting with interacting with objects and moving away from the Western dance I was trained in. In 2017 for example, I made a work called, The Hooks: No.2—as in the clothes hanger—and I bent metal to my body so that I could wear it. I felt that this approach, the approach of visual art performance, had less boundaries than dance.
But, because we have strict censorship in Vietnam, if a performance is too mysterious—in terms of its conceptual material— the government will stop the performance or arrest you. The coat hanger work was really powerful, because at times the metal caused me to bleed and after the performance an audience member approached me and asked what the work meant. They then said, “please feel free to talk to me, I’m not the cultural police.” This made me conscious that I’m interested in the power elicited from repeated gestures, but that performance art wasn’t necessarily the right fit either. So, I guess I try to situate myself between performance and choreography now.
Since moving to Australia in 2022, I have also been training in craniosacral therapy, which is about embodiment and being present with a client’s body during treatment, without trying to diagnose or fix them. This idea of being present with my body whilst also being in relationship with a space and an audience has now formed a core part of my practice. It’s been a process of becoming more conscious, more aware.
Australia is more multicultural and my practice has changed a lot in this environment. There’s a strong contemporary performance scene and so I often return to my culture because it's unique and not something everyone here has experienced. Not everyone here has the ability to make performance about Vietnamese culture. It’s also easier here because there’s less censorship. It’s more open. Whereas in Vietnam, censorship is just part of the artistic process. I like to think that I’ve embraced my own power, by exploring my cultural practice.
I’ve also been really inspired by the queer community here in Melbourne. It’s hard not to be inspired by that. In broader Southeast Asia it’s different. But things are changing, there’s more awareness now and the community is growing. In the past, the way performance explored queerness in the region was through dressing in feminine clothes and moving in feminine ways. This didn’t really resonate with me. It was too obvious. But here, I have found a way to communicate queerness that feels authentic to me.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: Focusing on Fluid Memories, could please frame the showing of this work conceptually and provide some detail on the melding of dance, video and installation work. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this showing, so I’d love to get a sense of what unfolded/s in the work. I’m particularly interested in hearing you unpack how the work incorporates the symbolism of the red scarf and military marching as a movement style and the decisions you made in exploring Australia’s manufacturing of Agent Orange.
CN: In the work I am acknowledging that memory is fluid and exploring what happens when memories are not fixed. I’m still in the process of developing the world of the work and through it, gaining more understanding of my practice. I create materials and curate others, then bring them together. The work stemmed from a 2024 development during the Independent Choreographers Program at Dancehouse in which I was mainly working with performance. I was exploring marching movements, due to the association with school children in socialist countries like Vietnam. I was also wearing the red scarf—a symbol of socialism—that school children were made to wear. In Vietnam, this marching is a mode of exercise and discipline, a way of bringing formality and order to a group of people who then follow a leader.
This movement is very basic, so I expanded upon it. I started watching videos on YouTube of children and adults marching. They film themselves practicing. It’s dancing in a way, but also contemporary performance. They do the movement, then they stop and check with the leader that they’re doing it right. Dr Priya Srinivasan—my mentor at Dancehouse—suggested I create and queer the marching movement to build upon this. I played with salutes and balletic movement—in which there are defined moments of tension and release. Censorship and control are also big parts of what I was trying to address in the work, so I also played with self-censorship, censoring my actions within these drills. This manifests as an externalisation of an internal fight with myself. It’s a personal cultural experience, which is then filtered through my body and interpreted by the audience.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: What about the manufacturing of Agent Orange in Australia?
CN: It was produced in Victoria, in a suburb called Fawkner, for the purpose of killing weeds. Nufarm, the company that made it, didn’t produce the Agent Orange that was sent to the Vietnam War. But there’s a place in Parramatta in Sydney that had a more direct connection. This is an area of artist James Nguyen’s research, he’s explored this before.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: Now feels like a good time to ask, how did you come to collaborate with James and how did this collaboration function?
CN: I was already friends with James, but I invited him into this project because I didn’t feel I had enough local knowledge, or the right to explore this here. The Vietnamese community in Australia is largely from the south, which is different from my own experience of growing up in communist Vietnam. I learned through James that there’s still real frictions within the Australian Vietnamese community between the north and south. Here, Vietnamese artists talk about southern culture and fighting with communists. I’m interested in the gap between this experience and my own. So, working with James stemmed from a desire to represent both parts of the spectrum of this experience.
James and I visited Fawkner and made the video work that appears in this performance. It’s quite a dry and toxic site and the soil was cracked. We lay red scarves over these cracks—trying to close the gap. This was an action at the time, but upon reflection, could be read as an act of labour or interpreted as a wound that we were trying to close. Which is a very different way of using the red scarf that the way it’s intended and gives it a different meaning.
The next thing we considered was the participatory elements of the work. Even if I don’t like a work, if it’s participatory, it stays with me because I experience it with my body. There’s a power in participation. In Australia too, the red scarf is hard to relate to—it’s not as loaded for an audience. So when people agreed to wear the scarf, I made sure they were aware before they put it on that wearing it might make them look like they’re a communist.
At the beginning of the showing, after they do or don’t accept the red scarf, the audience enters the main performance space, from a room where the process of making the video is documented in images and site-specific objects. In the main space, I am already performing when they enter—I’m doing the marching movement—and in a way that shifts the performance from me practicing something I’ve done before to performing it for an audience.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: What unfolds in the work after that?
CN: As part of my research for this work, I watched lots of documentaries on YouTube about the Vietnam War. I came across one in which a group of high school children play a game called ‘pằng pằng.’ You make a gun with your hand. So I did this, then invited the audience to join me. Which was interesting because people didn’t know how to respond. I used some clear consent words like, “if you’d like to join in, please stand up and come to me.” But some people didn’t participate, which is okay. I rehearsed with this outcome in mind.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: Perhaps they were hesitant because we don’t really have a gun culture here in Australia? Did the amount of participation increase as the showing went on?
CN: Some did, others didn’t. With participatory art, either type of engagement creates a layer for the work. The idea of being watched is very big in Vietnam, where censorship is a way of life. Similarly, when you perform, you’re conscious of being watched. It’s a loop of watching and performing. When the audience participates, they become a part of this loop too. But the question for me is how cognisant are they of what they’re participating in? Whilst it’s explored through the naive lens of a children’s game and whilst I also didn’t live through the war, this game is very much a manifestation of the trauma of this war. So I wonder how conscious the audience was?
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
AW: This game sounds like a strategy that’s consistent with your practice. As in, the digesting of experience through your own body and transmuting it to an audience. Now feels like the time to ask you about healing. In the framing information for this showing, you talk about cultivating a space of healing. How did you approach this?
CN: The participatory element is a process that allows for the digestion of trauma and creates the possibility of healing. For example, in Vietnamese culture, water and soil are seen as making up the country. So there was also a moment in the showing where I carried water over my head and invited the audience to join me in holding this water, in an act of carrying country. It was a socialist, collective gesture, in which we shared the load and acknowledged each other in this action. This created a sympathy and although not everyone came to hold the water with me, their witnessing was also a form of acknowledgment.
In 2025 and 2026, Performance Review and Temperance Hall are partnering to bring you written responses to Temperance Hall’s 2025 Front Studio Residency. This program offers six choreographic artists two-month studio residencies across the year and includes a stipend, public showing and photographic documentation.
To complement this, Performance Review is publishing a series of written responses on the public outcomes of this program, penned by emerging arts writers and grounded in conversations with these artists. The aim of this collaboration is to mutually develop critical reflection on the practices of local choreographic artists and build performance literacy in arts writing.
These responses have been funded by Temperance Hall through support from Creative Australia and independently commissioned by Performance Review. The writers in this program have been mentored by Anador Walsh, Performance Review’s Director.
The 2025 Temperance Hall Front Studio Residents are Tony Yap, Chung Nguyen, Geoffrey Watson, Deanne Butterworth, Gabriella Imrichova and Fleur Conlon.
This interview between Anador Walsh and Chung Nguyen is a response to the public showing of Nguyen’s Fluid Memories, presented at Temperance Hall on Wednesday 30 April 2025. NB: Walsh stepped in to cover this work after a commissioned writer fell through. As she did not see this showing, interview felt like the most appropriate format for this piece.