Minh Đức Phạm develops a new body of work during his Hà Nội residency, culminating in an exhibition. Photo courtesy of vac.art

HÀ NỘI — Berlin-based artist Minh Đức Phạm presents a new body of work shaped through research, observation, conversation and material experimentation during his residency in Hà Nội. 

Bringing together sculpture, installation and spatial interventions, his exhibition I Send You My Love offers visitors an opportunity to experience his art while gaining insight into the artistic process and inquiries that have unfolded throughout the residency.

Visitors are invited to spend time with the works and experience the relationships that emerge between objects, gestures and lived experience.

Phạm is a multimedia artist based in Berlin, working across installation, performance and object-making. He studied architecture before earning a master’s degree in Exhibition Design and Scenography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2019, and later studied performance and design theory at the Berlin University of Arts.

His practice probes at identity, belonging and existence at the intersection of gender, race and class, resurfacing migrant histories, queer lineages and solidarities formed between communities through movement and rupture.

Born to a family of Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany, Phạm draws from the lived experience of growing up between cultures, shaped by separation, cross-cultural kinship and the unresolved aftermath of German reunification.

Several of his works, such as 12 Percent – Giờ ăn đến rồi! (2022), A High Mountain, A Sweet Dream (2023) and Never Quite Right (2025), trace the experiences of Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany. His works have been exhibited in various venues in Germany, such as the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and others, both domestically and internationally.

Through his art he examines how social norms and regimes of care and control materialise in objects, textiles and everyday gestures.

Floral motifs, industrial references and fragile display structures recur as carriers of ambivalence between tenderness and resistance, preservation and erasure. By intertwining archival material with speculative narration, Phạm opens spaces in which shared histories can be re-read and renegotiated.

The exhibition runs from 10am to 6pm until September 6 at VAC, 6/44/11 Tô Ngọc Vân Street. — OVN/VNS