Always more to say

On Thursday, 11/13, collaborators Lumi Tan, Anh Vo, Đỗ Tường Linh and maura nguyễn donohue will discuss the research and conversations that have led to the development of their upcoming projects, focusing on experimental performance art from Vietnam. In particular, the group will share stories, findings, and images from their January 2025 trip to Hanoi and Saigon which informed an evolving discourse around the conditions of contemporary performance art in these two cities and beyond.

Always more to say kicks off a broader series of events, including an editorial project with Movement Research and a series of programs with Performance Space New York. Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #62, to be published in early 2026, will be dedicated to experimental Vietnamese performance art, with reflections from over fifteen artists and curators. The collaboration with Performance Space, titled , will be held between January 18 – February 9, 2026, and features a residency and series of new performance works by Vietnamese artists.

Bios:

Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the curator for the 2026 Converge 45 city-wide exhibition in Portland, Oregon, and a curator for Focus at Frieze New York. From 2010 to 2022, she was senior curator at The Kitchen in New York where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was guest curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at MoMA/PS1. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, numerous exhibition catalogs and university publications. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been visiting faculty at School of Visual Arts, New York; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and Yale School of Art.

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez's unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan's speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).

maura nguyễn donohue is Chair of Dance and Director of MFA at Hunter College and has been making work and facilitating, curating, producing, and leading public conversations in the US, Asia, and Europe for over 30 years. From 99-04, as artistic advisor for Dance Theater Workshop’s Mekong Project, maura facilitated residencies for AAPI and SE Asian artists in the US, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Most recently, maura was 1 of 12 choreographers included in Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, co-edited by thomas f. defrantz and Annie-B Parson. maura publishes through commissions from arts organizations such as MANCC, Danspace Project, DanceNYC and Gibney Dance, in academic presses such as Scholar & Feminist Online, Dance Studies Association, and Women and Performance, as well as at Culturebot. Ambivalent Selves: The Asian Female Body in American Concert Dance was published in Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance and excerpts of When You’re Old Enough were in the original (1998) and the 25th anniversary (2023) edition of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose.

Đỗ Tường Linh is a curator, art researcher, and writer based between Hanoi (Vietnam) and New York City (United States). She holds a BA in Art History and Theoretical Criticism from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa from SOAS, University of London, supported by the prestigious Alphawood Scholarship. In 2025, she completed an MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Linh was part of the curatorial team of the 12th Berlin Biennial and is currently the Artistic Director of VCCA (Hanoi, Vietnam) and Director of Nguyen Wahed Gallery (New York and London). Linh co-founded and is a member of Lunch Hour, a New York based artist/curator collective exploring and critiquing the mythologies around authorship, work, and labor. Since 2005, Linh has curated and contributed to exhibitions and projects across Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. She was a research fellow with Site and Space in Southeast Asia (Power Institute, University of Sydney, funded by the Getty Foundation) and has participated in international programs including Le 18 Curatorial Residency (2024), Asia Cultural Council Research Fellowship (2023), Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial (2019), Mekong Cultural Hub (2018–19), CIMAM Museum Workshop (2018), and Tate Intensive (2018). Her curatorial projects include Time Thrift (New York, 2025), Means of Production (New York, 2024), Revived Photo Hanoi (Hanoi, 2023), Citizen Earth (Hanoi, 2020), The Foliage 3 (VCCA, Hanoi, 2019), Geo-Resilience of the All-World (La Colonie, Paris, 2018), No War, No Vietnam (Galerie Nord, Berlin, 2018), and SEAcurrents (London, 2017).

Light refreshments will be provided.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Vilcek Foundation, and other foundations and individuals.

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