To Remember in Forgetting

This body of work takes the architectural form of the Hanoi tube house—those narrow, stacked structures shaped by necessity and the compressed tempo of urban life. Recast in soap, a material chosen for its ephemerality and sensuous tactility, each sculpture functions as both monument and memento.

The use of soap—a substance that dissolves, softens, and yields to time—subverts the architectural promise of solidity. Geometry is precise, even formalist, but the medium insists on change. Over days and weeks, each structure begins to lean, blister, and erode. This is not failure, but intent: a slow choreography of collapse that renders disappearance visible.

Duong’s work disengages from the impulse to preserve. The sculptures breathe, sweat, and shrink in response to their environment—ambient heat, moisture, even touch—all agents of transformation. The material becomes a stand-in for memory itself: mutable, tender, always on the verge of vanishing.

These are works that resist stasis. They are not preserved, but performed—acts of dissolution that speak to the transience of place, the porousness of identity, and the cost of progress. In their soft undoing, they ask what kind of city is left when the structures that once held it begin to melt.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and your artistic practice?

I’m Duong Thuy Nguyen, a Vietnamese artist. My practice traverses homes, landscapes, and the blurred spaces in between. I think a lot about migration, about labour, about how memory sits in the body, or doesn’t. I’m not looking for clean answers. Most of the time, I’m just trying to stay with the mess - what’s left behind, what’s passed down, what slips through.

I build spaces - not to contain - but to hold. Porous habitats, maybe. Places where histories leak out at the corners. Where viewers aren’t told what to feel, but are invited to sit with the weight of it. The colonial, the industrial, the inherited and the fragile. Things rot. Things grow back.

I make things slowly. Sometimes they fall apart. Sometimes they hold.

I work with what’s around me - dust, wood, metal, paper - the stuff that remembers, that stains your hands, that crumbles when held too tightly. These materials feel familiar. Domestic. Tired. But they carry stories. About where I’ve been. About where we’ve all been, even if we don’t talk about it.

There’s care in this slowness. In not knowing. In making space for other ways of understanding - ones that aren’t always written down or spoken out loud. I lean into those gaps. Into intergenerational murmurs. Into gestures that might not mean much until later. Or never.

It’s not about resolution. It’s about remaining. With the cracks. With the quiet. With each other.

In your bio, you mentioned that your practice examines the environmental ruptures caused by rapid industrialization, particularly in northern Vietnam’s disappearing rural landscapes. Could you elaborate on how you approach these themes through a visual language?

The landscapes I return to - mentally, materially - are ones in flux. Northern Vietnam’s rural spaces, once shaped by subsistence and kinship, are now increasingly scarred by concrete, extraction, and speed. What disappears isn’t just land, but ways of knowing, tending, and relating. I’m drawn to that disappearance - not to document it, but to sit with its residue.

Visually, I work through fragmentation. I let materials behave as they want to - warp, crumble, oxidise. I use water, soil - materials that feel impermanent, interrupted. Forms often hover between abstraction and biomorphic remnants, echoing bodies or landscapes without naming them. These gestures speak to what has been broken down - by industry, by time - and what still manages to persist.

I think of my work, Silent Well, as a quiet convergence of these threads. An interactive installation, it centres on a sculptural well encircled by soil and a constellation of flat, cloud-like forms suspended above. Drawing from my ongoing exploration of Hanoi’s water infrastructure and the mystical motifs of Vietnamese folk tales, the piece reflects on the iconic village wells of the Red River Delta - once vital communal sites around which daily life unfolded.

At its heart is a sensory water mechanism. But the flowing water isn’t water at all - it’s moss, suspended in liquid and air, animated only by the viewer’s movement. As one approaches, the piece seems to stir awake, like memory rising under soft surveillance. It doesn’t demand attention - it murmurs, it waits.

Rather than offering a single image of rupture, I work toward a kind of atmospheric memory - where material carries the emotional weight of environmental change. Where absence, erosion, and decay are not endpoints, but languages in themselves.

What motivated you to apply and participate in this online program? What were your initial goals and expectations?

I applied to the Insights of an Eco Artist online residency at a moment when I was feeling unmoored. I’d been working quietly, slowly, inside the solitude of my own process - and I needed to be in conversation again. Not just to show work, but to sit with others who were also thinking about the ecological - about disappearance, fragility, resilience - not just as themes, but as lived conditions.

What drew me to this program was its scale: intimate, focused, relational. The idea of growing alongside a small group of artists, with space to exchange ideas, receive honest feedback, and reflect on practice in a way that felt attentive and generous - that was meaningful to me. I wasn’t looking for visibility alone; I was looking for resonance.

My initial goals were quite simple:

To slow down, and to listen.

To find language for the things in my work, I often struggle to name - those quiet inheritances, those environmental griefs that resist articulation.

To be challenged in a way that felt caring.

To be reminded that even in digital space, dialogue can feel real, if it’s held with intention.

I also hoped the residency would offer some grounding - a way to situate my practice more clearly within the field of ecological art, while still holding space for ambiguity and uncertainty. I wanted guidance, but not answers. Support, but not smoothing over.

Mostly, I hoped for connection - to people, to place, to practice. And to begin, again, from there.

During the residency, you worked on a series of soap sculptures, where you describe these works as "performed—acts of dissolution" rather than preserved objects. This positions entropy itself as the performer. What does it mean to surrender authorial control to environmental forces? How do you negotiate the art market's desire for permanent objects when your work is fundamentally about disappearance?

In To Remember in Forgetting, the sculptures are not static objects; they are performances unfolding slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time. The soap leans, softens, dissolves - not because I instruct them to, but because the material insists on change. Entropy becomes the performer. I simply set the stage.

Choosing soap - something so tactile, so bodily, so impermanent - was a way to challenge the architectural fantasy of permanence. These forms reference Hanoi’s tube houses, structures shaped by survival, density, and compression. By recasting them in soap, I wanted to hold both their endurance and their fragility at once. They stand, but only for a while. They disappear, not in one gesture, but in a slow yielding.

In this way, the sculptures act as proxies for memory: mutable, fragmentary, and embodied. Theorists like Marianne Hirsch have written about “postmemory” - how traumatic histories are not passed down through facts, but through affective fragments, gestures, atmosphere (Hirsch, Family Frames, 1997). The work operates within that framework. It is not about reenactment, but resonance. The erosion is not loss - it is transmission.

Your soap sculptures of Hanoi tube houses create a fascinating paradox—using architecture's most ephemeral medium to represent its most enduring forms. What drew you to soap as a material for exploring urban memory? How does the physical act of watching these structures dissolve mirror your experience of Hanoi's rapid transformation?

What drew me to soap was its contradiction - at once intimate and unstable. It’s a domestic material, touched daily, associated with care and cleansing. But it’s also fugitive. It softens, shrinks, vanishes. In that way, it felt like the right vessel to hold something as complex as urban memory. 

The Hanoi tube house - narrow, vertical, often improvised - is a form shaped by constraint, resilience, and inheritance. These homes carry layers of lived history: spatial negotiations, kinship structures, architectural memory compressed into a few square meters. They persist, but they’re also under threat - disappearing beneath glass facades, luxury towers, and speculative development. I didn’t want to recreate these houses as monuments. I wanted to show them as I feel them: vulnerable, breathing, on the edge of erasure.

Soap allowed me to embody that fragility. The sculptures begin with precision - clean lines, careful geometry - but the material refuses to stay still. Watching them dissolve over time becomes an act of witnessing, of mourning.

The physical dissolution becomes a form of translation: memory made visible through decay. In a way, I’m not sculpting buildings - I’m sculpting their disappearance. The act of letting go becomes part of the work. And in doing so, I hope to hold space for something that’s not preservation, but presence. A soft resistance. A quiet grief.

In your work statement, you mention "the material becomes a stand-in for memory itself: mutable, tender, always on the verge of vanishing." This suggests memory is not just the subject but the medium of your work. How do you convey collective versus personal memory? What memories are being actively forgotten in contemporary Hanoi?

Yes - memory is not just a theme in my work, it’s embedded in the material itself. I’m drawn to materials like soap because they behave like memory: unstable, porous, shaped by their environment. They do not preserve; they shift, erode, transform. They hold and release, much like memory itself.

In my practice, I move between personal and collective memory not by separating them, but by holding them in tension. Personal memory is often the entry point - my family’s home in Hanoi, the textures of tiled floors, the sound of water echoing through alleyways. But those memories are never just mine. They’re entangled in what Maurice Halbwachs called collective memory - a social framework shaped by shared spaces, rituals, and relationships (On Collective Memory, 1992). My materials attempt to hold that duality: the individual as part of the collective, the intimate as a trace of the historical.

What’s being forgotten in contemporary Hanoi is rarely spectacular or commemorated. It’s the mundane, the interstitial. Communal wells, wet markets, inherited spatial rhythms, and informal economies - all are being overwritten by vertical development, sanitised design, and the logic of acceleration. In this, I draw on Marc Augé’s concept of non-places - urban spaces that lack relational or historical identity (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995). As Hanoi modernises, more and more of the city is becoming unfamiliar, not because it’s new, but because it no longer remembers how it used to be.

How do you document these works as they transform? Do you see photography, video, or other recording methods as part of the work, or do they betray the fundamental premise of impermanence? 

I use photography and video, but always with hesitation. They are tools, not truths. A photograph captures a moment, but only one - the light falling just so, the surface before it warps, a structure still holding its shape. It can never fully convey the slow, almost imperceptible shifts: how the soap sweats, how the air thickens with humidity, how a corner of a sculpture begins to lean inward over time. In that sense, documentation becomes less about evidence and more about trace - what Rebecca Schneider calls a "reenactment of presence through absence” (Performing Remains, 2011).

I see these recordings as ghosts of the work, not replacements for it. They are partial witnesses. They allow the work to travel, to be shared, but they also miss something fundamental - the intimacy of witnessing entropy in real time. That slowness, that proximity, the quiet grief of watching something vanish, cannot be fully captured. But it can be gestured toward.

I’m also thinking with artists and theorists like Hito Steyerl, who critiques the politics of the image - how resolution, clarity, and control are often aligned with power. In resisting high-definition, in embracing blur or low fidelity, I allow the instability of the original work to carry through into the documentation itself. The documentation, then, doesn’t betray impermanence - it echoes it.

Can you share an example of how you and your fellow artists inspired or learned from each other during the collaborative process?

One of the most meaningful exchanges during the residency happened with Aqeela Sherazi. Her practice - so rooted in care, ritual, and presence - really spoke to something I had been circling around in my work, but hadn’t fully named. I remember during one of our group conversations, I shared images of my soap sculptures: these fragile tube houses slowly breaking down, their edges softening, warping. I was trying to explain how I wasn’t preserving them - how I was letting them go.

Aqeela listened quietly and then said something I still carry with me: “It feels like your sculptures are remembering as they vanish.”

That line shifted something for me. I had always thought of the work in terms of loss - loss of space, of memory, of history. But the way she framed it - as a kind of active remembering, even in disappearance - helped me understand the work as an offering, not just an elegy.

Her own work, with its attention to breath, to earth, to ritual, reminded me that slowness is not absence - it’s presence. We spoke about impermanence not as failure, but as continuity.

Later, when I was filming one of my sculptures slowly collapsing - its surface blistering under heat - I thought of her again. How she uses pigment in prayerful, ephemeral gestures. It made me more attentive to the gestures in my own process: the way a form leans before it falls. These became small rituals of noticing.

We didn’t collaborate in a formal sense, but I still feel that our work touched. There was something generous in the way we held space for each other’s ideas - something soft, slow, and sustaining. That kind of exchange isn’t always easy to name. But it stays with you.

What remains after these sculptures have completely dissolved? Is there a residue—material, conceptual, or emotional—that constitutes the work's completion? How do you think about the "finished" state of a work designed to disappear entirely?

What’s left when the sculpture disappears?

Sometimes a shimmer. A damp ring on the floor, actually. 

But mostly, it’s what stays with the body that was near it. The act of watching something collapse slowly, not in drama, but in fatigue. A lean, a blister, a soft undoing. That moment becomes the work.

I don’t think of these pieces as finished. They don’t land. They drift. Their end is a kind of soft release. The structure gives way, and in that gesture - of not holding, of letting go - they say something they couldn’t while intact.

Maybe the work completes itself in the remembering. That’s the residue I care about. Not the object, but the imprint. Not ownership, but intimacy.

Disappearance isn’t absence. It’s just a quieter kind of presence. One that lives not in the archive, but in the air between two people who shared a moment of attention.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the point.

If you could give one piece of advice to future participants of this program, what would it be?

Let yourself be porous.

Don’t rush to explain your work. Let it breathe. Let it shift in conversation, in silence, in shared screens and late-night writing. This program isn’t just about output - it’s about noticing. What stirs in you when someone else speaks? What trembles at the edge of your practice when you slow down long enough to listen?

Show up honestly. Not with answers, but with questions you’re still holding. Let others meet you there - not to solve, but to witness. That’s where the real learning happens.

And don’t underestimate the quiet connections. Sometimes a single comment, a shared reading, a soft pause in critique - that’s the thing that stays with you long after it ends.

Know more about the artist here.

See the immersive virtual exhibition here.

All images:

To Remember in Forgetting, Soap, 2025. By Duong Thuy Nguyen

All images courtesy of Duong Thuy Nguyen.