Nguyễn Mạnh Thắng is a Hanoi-based artist whose work spans lacquer painting, ceramics, video, installation, and interdisciplinary artistic practice. His work reflects on Vietnamese cultural memory, folklore, ritual, and social transformation through both traditional materials and contemporary media. Over the past decades, he has exhibited internationally across Europe and Asia while continuing long-term collaborations with traditional craft communities in Vietnam.

Nguyễn Mạnh Thắng's artistic practice explores memory, ritual, folklore, spirituality, and social transformation in contemporary Vietnamese life through lacquer, ceramics, installation, video, and interdisciplinary artistic research. A central focus of his work is the period after the Vietnam War and the profound societal transformations that followed. The years after the war marked an extremely rapid and radical shift in Vietnam, politically, economically, culturally, and emotionally. Traditional social structures, collective identities, spiritual practices, and ways of living changed within a very short period of time. This transformation deeply affected communities, family relations, urban development, and the relationship between memory and modernity. Through his work, he investigates how these historical ruptures continue to shape contemporary Vietnamese society and emotional life today. He is particularly interested in the tension between disappearance and continuity: how rituals, folklore, ancestral practices, and collective memories survive within a society shaped by acceleration, globalization, migration, and modernization. Materials such as lacquer, ceramics, sound, and moving image allow him to explore how memory becomes embedded in objects, spaces, gestures, and atmospheres.

The fellowship project “Affective Nourishment” directly connects to this long-term artistic inquiry. Within the project, he explores how Vietnamese altar practices, food rituals, and domestic spaces operate as emotional and spiritual infrastructures of care, especially within diasporic Vietnamese communities. For him, these practices are deeply connected to post-war experiences of displacement, adaptation, intergenerational memory, and the preservation of emotional belonging across geographic and cultural distance. His work approaches these questions through visual language, ritual aesthetics, sound, and material memory. He is particularly interested in how emotional knowledge exists not only inside artworks, but also within everyday gestures such as cooking, preparing altars, sharing meals, and collective gathering. Through audiovisual and spatial artistic practice, he aims to translate these invisible emotional structures into visual and sensory experiences. This research is also connected to XOAY, the cultural café and interdisciplinary community space he is currently developing in Hanoi. XOAY functions as a space where art, conversation, food, and community come together through exhibitions, gatherings, workshops, and shared meals. For him, the café is important because it creates an everyday environment where cultural memory, hospitality, and collective exchange can continue to exist naturally within contemporary urban life.

Within the CRC fellowship, he hopes to further develop these ideas through artistic and audiovisual research, while contributing to broader discussions around affect, migration, decoloniality, memory, and community-based cultural practice.

Publications (selected)

• Art of Slang (2003)
• Co-Existence (2024)