As part of Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice, esea contemporary presents How to Touch the Elephant, an online reading performance and discussion by Vietnamese German interdisciplinary artist Hiền Hoàng. Hoàng is currently undertaking a residency in Vietnam (24 August–29 September), where she is continuing her research into the ecological and embodied legacies of Agent Orange and the post-Agent Orange landscapes of Vietnam.
Starting with a memory passed down from her father, of bomb fragments that have remained in his chest since the Vietnam War in 1969, Hoàng takes the audience on a journey into the ecological trauma of the post-Agent Orange landscapes of Vietnam. From the spraying maps that once saturated forests and altered bodies across generations, to the embodied act of remapping the soil, the work explores how the legacies of war remain present within landscapes and living bodies.
How to Touch the Elephant is an interdisciplinary, research-based project that asks what it means to inherit the shadow of war, to attend to a trauma that outlives one’s own life, and to be touched back by the landscape in turn. Through soil measurement, on-site drawing, material research, and data sonification, Hoàng considers how environments can register histories of violence and how these histories might be sensed, measured, and made visible.
Following the reading performance, Hoàng will join Xiaowen Zhu and the audience for a discussion on the unresolved aftermath of Agent Orange and the structural limitations of juridical systems in addressing its ongoing effects. The conversation will consider what art can do where the law falls short, and how the enduring effects of toxic warfare are lived by local communities, whose environments, health and collective memories continue to bear the consequences across generations.
This event will take place online. Booking is required.
About ‘Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice’
‘Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice’ is a talk and editorial series initiated by esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, exploring how contemporary art is shaped beyond dominant cultural centres. Bringing together artists, curators, writers, and researchers working across East and Southeast Asia, the series foregrounds practices rooted in specific places, where artistic work develops through everyday life, local knowledge, and long-term engagement with communities.
Moving across urban villages, county towns, coastal regions, and regional networks, the series examines how artistic practice responds to labour, migration, ecology, and social change. Rather than positioning these places as peripheral to cultural production, Off Centre understands them as sites where cultural life is actively produced, negotiated, and sustained.
Together, the talks and accompanying essays consider how artistic practice is shaped by lived conditions rather than institutional proximity. Tracing connections across diverse contexts through questions of care, labour, knowledge, and placemaking, they attend to the ways art is produced, circulated, and sustained within situated environments, while asking how these sites, in turn, generate their own cultural imaginaries and forms of collective life.
Hiền Hoàng (b. 1991) is a Vietnamese German interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, ecology, and material research. Her practice investigates how matter records violence, care, and memory, working with corroded metals, mycelium, soil, archival photographs, and sensor-based systems to explore how trauma is stored in both living and non-living bodies.
Her ongoing project How to Touch the Elephant approaches post-Agent Orange landscapes in Vietnam through soil measurement, on-site drawing, and data sonification, taking the form of lecture performances, installations, and participatory workshops. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Les Rencontres d'Arles, and Centro Cibeles Madrid. She was awarded the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2024.
Hoàng is completing an MRes at the Royal College of Art, London, and works between London, Hanoi, and Frankfurt am Main.
