In a time marked by deep fractures and lacerating conflicts, Vietnam chooses to appear for the first time at the Venice Art Biennale through an intimate and evocative flow.

The inauguration is scheduled for 8 May at 11 a.m. in the space of Ca’ Faccanon, in Calle delle Acque, in the sestiere of San Marco.

The pavilion is entitled ‘Vietnam: Art in the Global Stream‘.

Vietnam tells its story by choosing peace as a cultural horizon, art that recomposes and creates harmony. It is already written: not a simple exhibition, but a crossing.

Among the ten artists, Lê Huu Hiêu (born in 1982) has designed an exhibition that will surprise the viewer with a sense of harmony and peace. The connection with the country’s origins, ‘Mother Earth’, images that touch on the origin of Life. The artist renounces elevating his works on pedestals, the sculptures are directly in contact with the ground, the earth, the origin. The technique used is hom dat: jaka wood is covered with worked clay mixed with water, straw and chaff, and then baked in a fire for days inside a pit. This material has the merit of having an extraordinary durability and of retaining an ancient patina that cannot be reproduced by any modern artifice. The material has its own memory, nothing is superficial.

These are works created over long periods of time, rich in symbolic value. No acknowledgement of the traumatic memories of war, the gaze is directed towards the dimension of everyday life: work, spiritual practices, the land, shared memory.

The viewer will also have to walk through the space immersing himself in this same living flow: an unstoppable course where ordinary people become the protagonists of the story. What Lê Huu Hiêu creates is a tension between matter and life, raising an ancient species of silkworm on his works. Creatures that become a perfect metaphor for the human being: they build, they mutate, they evolve. Silent transformations until the wrapping is broken.

And flight.

Vietnam’s debut in Venice comes at a time when the country chooses a diplomacy that does not impose itself, but navigates gracefully between the tectonic plates of contemporary geopolitics. Hanoi has built its foreign policy on a principle it calls ‘bamboo diplomacy’ – flexibility of the roots, resistance of the stem – and this pavilion is, perhaps unconsciously, its most precise aesthetic translation. A perfect balance between adaptation and resistance.