Open Window: Trịnh Ngân Hạnh, Thịt Phơi phồ

Ingredients:
Whole slab of pork belly
Summer
Sweat

Process:
Heated from the sun, smoke, engines, and bodies

Result:
Leaking fluid, changing colour, emitting aroma

Purpose:
To search for a different end

Thịt Phơi phồ (which translates to “Street dried meat”) documents the artist as she cycles through Hanoi’s streets with a slab of pork belly strapped to her back. Over several hours, the heat, smoke and humidity of the city alter the meat’s consistency and colour, as its juices are transferred to the artist’s clothing and skin.

As a gesture, Trịnh Ngân Hạnh’s work interrogates the role and place of the animal within urban environments. Most often found caged, or stray, or served on a plate, animals tend to be treated as aberrations in a setting built with human development and the flow of goods and capital in mind. The artist’s playful act of displacing fleshy matter might evoke disgust—as the meat transforms from pink to dull brown over the course of the video—or it might invite a comparison between the hoards of human travellers stuck at a crawling pace in traffic, and animals funnelled through the industrial farming system from pasture to processing plant to dinner table. In its play with the proximity and distance between people, creatures and the environment in which they are situated, the work, as the artist suggests, proposes “a softening of the boundary between human and meat.”

This work was developed as an outcome of Green, Red & Yellow Recontextualized (Xanh Đỏ & Vàng Tái Xuất), a year-long learning programme for artists organised by APD, Hanoi (an initiative founded by Trần Lương, Đỗ Hoài Nam and Nguyễn Đức Thành in 2020) over 2024. Through a series of talks, skills workshops, group discussions and mentorship, participants examined developing changes in context, attitude, expressive languages and generational psychology within Vietnam’s art scene and society at large—and the role artmaking and inquiry plays in interrogating changing circumstances, and materialising the world anew.

The title of the programme references the 2003 exhibition Green, Red & Yellow. Staged at the Goethe-Institut in Hanoi, the exhibition is considered the first large-scale contemporary art exhibition in Hanoi, incorporating installation, interactive performance art, and experimental approaches by a generation of artists contending with rapid urbanisation, and the social transformations wrought by globalisation. The curatorial proposition expanded upon the symbolism encoded into traffic light signals: red for stop; green for go; with yellow representing an indeterminate space of both ambiguity and potential. “Yellow symbolizes a state of hesitance,” writes Trần Lương in a curatorial reflection published in 2023, “the moment for warm-up, or moments of weariness and illness. It also represents the excitement, the sublimation of breaking the way, the realm of breaking the way, the realm of emotions of intuition.” [1]

As well, the title and concept reference a poem by Lê Đạt, first published in Nhân Văn (Humanity) Newspaper in 1956, which encourages artists to resist state censorship and limits on artistic freedom: “take the traffic police podium placed in the heart of the people.” [2] The inclusion of Trịnh Ngân Hạnh’s work in relation to Trần Lương’s survey exhibition Tầm Tã – Soaked in the Long Rain seeks to offer audiences in Aotearoa an opportunity to engage with an emerging artistic voice, as well as to locate Trần Lương as both an archivist of a generation of artists and intellectuals who preceded him, and enabler and mentor of developing practitioners.  Through these references and evocations of works and gestures past, both Trịnh Ngân Hạnh and Trần Lương are positioned within a continuum of practitioners insisting on the role artists play as critics of existing power structures, and the capacity artistic inquiry holds to digest changing conditions through material transformation, discussion and thought.

Trịnh Ngân Hạnh graduated in Arts Plastiques from Rennes 2 University, France (2020), and is currently working at the APD Center for Art Patronage and Development. Her practice spans visual arts and curatorial work, with a particular interest in the role of art in social development.

Hạnh curated the project “Chơi Rì” (2025, Na Rì, Thái Nguyên), in collaboration with ChildFund Vietnam; the exhibitions "Chèo Méo" (June & November 2024, Hanoi) and More Than Meet the Eyes (2023), organized by the social enterprise Tòhe, aimed at raising awareness about autism. She has also facilitated art activities for children with special needs. Her recent artistic collaborations include FETA – Video Art Beyond Walls (2025, APD Center), and Green Red & Yellow: Recontextualized (2024, APD Center).

[1] Trần Lương, “Introduction,” Green Red & Yellow (Xanh Đỏ & Vàng) Exhibition Documentation, Hanoi: Open Archive – APD Art Library, July 2023.

[2] Lê Đạt. “Nhân câu chuyện mấy người tự tử,” Nhân Văn (Humanity) Newspaper, No.1, 20 September 1956, p. 3.