Dam Van Hunyh’s returning works, In Realness (2022) and Exquisite Noise (2024), are stubbornly loud as they delve into protest and identity. Huynh’s own sense of being, muddling in displacement, queerness and Vietnamese heritage, is reflected in his works but also delves into Western society’s broader picture. When asked if his work always intended to be politically charged and a direct engagement with queerness, Huynh responds that interaction with these topics is organic – a natural occurrence of the time, and always at the forefront of his consciousness. Protest and Huynh’s work are purposefully disruptive and expose conversations that can’t – and must not – be ignored but also celebrates identities and communities.
Drawing inwardly, Huynh’s perception of home as a Vietnamese refugee leaving Vietnam after the war is blurred, an undefined inner space. The abstract nature of his work, rarely following a clear narrative but infused with emotion and insistent sound, reflects the covert blur that underpins Huynh’s sense of home. Influenced by political writers, journeys to various countries to dive into contemporary dance and an ever-expanding experience as a working choreographer, the following interview examines Exquisite Noise alongside Huynh’s inspirations.
With regards to your heritage and the Vietnam war, I wonder if that’s impacted the lens through which you view politics in the UK, and how it might shape your work?
Coming from that heritage and journey, there is always a level of urgency for me on the topics I discuss in my work, and because I’ve experienced it, because I understand the major life impact it has once the structure and the system has fallen apart in some sense, I am still working through this notion of displacement. Something that is hard that I’ve embraced at the moment, is this huge vastness of shame that comes with being a displaced refugee that you live with for so long because you don’t want to be an “other”. But for a long time, you can’t say the words “I’m ashamed of myself”. It took me a long time, and through creativity and being fortunate enough to work in the arts, one needs to reflect on oneself to say “I am ashamed”, or “I have been ashamed”, and that was quite liberating. These things really affect the individual. That’s me in one part of society. If we let the system break even further, then I realise that the impact will be long-term. I think that creates a very large rift in our society and the world itself.
It’s experience that impacts my thoughts, then again, appreciation and love for something that has been newly discovered, that feels so precious. To deny this is a tragedy, to deny this beautiful, precious thing that exists already.
How has your position as a refugee impacted your perception of home, and does this inform your work?
Home for me parallels the way I construct work. Home has a weird clarity of outer shell and inner space, which is undefined, nondescript. My work tends to fall into this action as well – one would call it undefined or non-narrative based, because I myself am unclear and there are many things I can’t seem to reconcile within myself. Utilising English, the language of the Americans who committed the atrocities that happened in my country… I’m from the South where we fought for a democratic state, and here I am utilising a Western-based art form to express myself, to talk about a history that’s really etched into Eastern heritage. There are days when I wake up, and I think I’ve reconciled some of it, and there are days where I cannot reconcile it. For me, my work herds philosophically into this notion of home where I think the core of it is blurry and nondescript as I try to define it for myself and as I try to find home. But what I can do is really create and conjure provocations and structures around the outline of what I understand to be home, or what I understand to be my art, so I can create images or narratives to form an outer structure. I hope these structures conjure conversations for people and allow them to find out for themselves what could be the core of this search, without me directing them. For me, the audience and myself go on the same journey and try to understand what [home] means. I would be very shocked to find a person who has been displaced who could find such clarity, but this is where I feel I wish I could utilise other art forms like writing and poetry. They have such a beautiful capacity to bend space and time and inner dimensions of a flat piece of paper. But my medium is movement, looking at time and space so instead of being linear, I conjure, I paint, I fashion things that invite us to have deeper discussions.
In a way, I think you do turn to words and poetry. I remember in In Realness, there was a lot of dialogue and I think some of it was off poetry and political quotes. Is there a particular figure or writer who inspires you?
There are many in my working process. At the moment, there are many artists and writers who have really pushed the work in terms of its research. Mitsuye Yamada, activist, writer and poet, who lived through the Japanese internment camps during a period where her experience of being in a Japanese minority was really quite horrific, because they were practically made invisible. In fact, Moving Eastman (2024) responded to her famous quote
“To finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the path toward visibility. Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone.”
This was her referring to a period where the notion of being invisible is not natural, but when that action happens to you, it’s a removal of oneself, and then you start losing your grounding in the society. You can’t pitch where you’re positioned, and then it’s a nothingness. The conversation doesn’t exist because they will ignore you if you go any further.
Writers and activists such as Audre Lorde, who is brilliant with her ability to articulate words, encourage us to be. She has a book where the opening line was about the light in which one reflects upon oneself, and one has to be proactive. I’m paraphrasing, but one has to be proactive so that you are clear about what you are discussing, otherwise the discussion is just one big blurry conversation.
There are also visual artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was making profound comments with his artwork on community and the discourse between institutions in positions of power versus the community. These things, I think, always are swirling and whirling through my work. And so you can see their influence quite heavily, the deep strokes and deep brushes, and at the same time, very striking poetic words, in my mind, cuts and resonates right through to the experience.
I suppose with that fusion of movement and spoken word, you could perhaps argue that it makes your voice and the discussion that you’re trying to delve into more visible?
Yes, exactly. And you know, now that you’ve brought up that particular poignant word of “voice”, part of my journey has been to discover this. In my mind, it wasn’t possible for a long time that I could actually have a voice. And I think through these years, I’ve been collaborating with a very close friend called Elaine Mitchener. She’s a vocal extended artist, a movement artist as well. Through our collaborations, I’ve learned to open my mouth and let the sound out and not be judgmental on what is beautiful, or what is a beautiful sound or not. And I think these words, again, amplify and allow me to express what perhaps I felt I could not before due to, again, the impacts of what it means to be a displaced person.
Watching the trailer for Exquisite Noise, there seems to be a lot in common thematically with In Realness. Has In Realness impacted the idea and development of Exquisite Noise at all?
Completely. I think for me, I’m really a huge believer in the notion of extension and expansion. Those particular actions are really pivotal because they embody the notion of accumulation and unity and the gathering of an idea to gain momentum further. I think this is a way to ensure that a comment is not just done once and then thrown away. It would be naïve of me to believe that I have finished one research, and that we have already said everything we needed to say about one particular inequality or one particular political conversation. I’m deviating a bit because I was thinking, I remember sitting and listening to a panel where someone from a very high position of decision-making and authority had the audacity to say that, “oh, yes, you know, the era of talking about decolonisation has been done, it is resolved.” And I’m like, I’m sorry, it hasn’t been resolved. We need to continue this conversation. Just because it’s no longer on your agenda for funding purposes doesn’t mean that it’s been resolved, because no-one gave me that memo. My point is that the one comment needs to be further continued so that the conversation can go on.
I want to encourage people to think of a conversation not as a negative thing, something that we need to continually do as a species, and as active participants in the political and social wellbeing of our society. In Realness was particularly talking about gender politics, but there were other pieces that talked about racial equality and so forth. For me, it’s clear that there’s a definitive period after the phrase “human rights”, period. Gender politics or gender equality as a community and their rights is the same as Asian rights or Black rights or refugee rights, immigration rights, period. I think it does the society a disservice, and it does our movement of unity a disservice if we break them up and fraction them off and say, okay, you will only fight for gender equality and I will fight for Black rights. That fraction is what causes further distance. We have to know that Black rights are Asian rights, are LGBTQ rights. It’s the same fight. Human rights, period. It’s one right. My point is that it’s always about expanding and examining from as many aspects as possible this very crucial discussion.
Looking at In Realness and Exquisite Noise stylistically and things that they have in common – the car tyres, I’m really curious as to where that came from.
I had done a response to a work by Alan Kaprow in the Hepworth Gallery ages ago. Alan Kaprow is noted as the founding father of performance art. What I felt was crucial was that he had this innate ability to break down boundaries and structures. It was so impactful for me, this notion that I didn’t need to colour inside the line if the lines were not allowing, again, more inclusivity of various communities. This stuck with me for many years before I really wanted to research what he was actually doing. I think this sense of liberation was a huge quotation into the tyre, but he also, as an artist, did a lot of activist work through his art, looking at ways to break down boundaries and barriers that are permeating through various structures. I wanted to quote these objects and the tyres themselves are quite interesting because they run through human history, but they do have a political impact as well. The wheel itself is a huge leap in terms of human ingenuity, the fact that we have evolved to utilise this very particular geometric shape, propel ourselves forward, that in itself is quite an interesting object to look at. I also think it helps to define us as a species. We’re a species that for the first time looked at geometry in a particular way to utilise it. It’s distinctive and I think this was really a beautiful comment.
Tragically on the other side of that coin, during the research, we were looking at South Africa during the apartheid era. They would do tragic things to those deemed to be traitors, where they would pour petrol on tyres and put them around so-called traitors and light them. But these things interplay. In one sense, you’ve got this beautiful notion of human ingenuity and symbolism, and then the horrible way in which we could use it. It’s the duality of those symbols, so that’s where the tyres have emerged.
In what ways do the roles of soundscapes and vocal performance in Exquisite Noise differ from your previous works?
I don’t know if the word “differ” is there. I think I would replace it more with the expansion. And that here we were really looking at much more. They’re all quite guttural, but this one was really embracing noise across the ranges. You can hear some texts, but it was more important that we liberate the sounds of our vocals to more innate bounds where we release the scream, we release the self. Again, I wouldn’t say they are vastly different, but I would say they are taking expansion to another approach.
We also utilise a lot of books from previous works, again, to unite the commentary into a larger conversation. You can see from various works in the previous, let’s say, decade, they were making commentaries on various different geopolitical situations. And now the whole comment of Exquisite Noise was a totality of it all. I also believe that our conversations need to be had and we need to face them because it’s here and we can’t just bury our heads in the sand. On the flip side of that, I think the objective of me putting these visceral noises and sound distortions into the space was to spark the conversation, but more importantly, to remind us of the celebratory act we must take to remind ourselves that we have such a precious gift. Exquisite Noise takes this position more than as a description of dystopia.
In 2014, you went to Vietnam to rediscover the culture and you reconnected it with it through contemporary dance. How does the contemporary dance scene in Vietnam compare with the UK?
Actually, I was quite surprised when I went there. I think they are working with different parameters and are still within much firmer limitations than ours. I’m just trying to be gentle to navigate that carefully, because I’m also aware that they are in an evolutionary state, and so I wish not to make commentaries that I’m not 100% clear on which direction they may or may not go. What I think was surprising, and at the same time quite beautifully affirming for me, was that they continued to find creative scope for expressions that I think were quite complex, but they found it in a way that they could manage. I have always fundamentally believed that you can never oppress the arts. You suppress it in one region, even if it’s just a crack in a hole somewhere, it will flourish in some other capacity. And it was quite affirming for me to see that. There are gentle cracks that I saw those artists guide their work through with some form of light and clarity, and it was quite beautiful. I can’t honestly say that there were differences, but I could say that we are working under different parameters, and that the beauty that is art continues to prevail. I think that was the most beautiful discovery I had there.
When you were there, what sort of process did you go through? So did you collaborate with other artists, create work, or was it mainly sort of viewing and observing?
Both, I think. I mean, I did collaborate with local artists. I have to give credit and much appreciation to the British Council for this opportunity as well. I think it was a time when something clicked and I said, you know what, I think I need to rediscover myself and the culture. When I went there, I worked with local artists, gathered sound samples because the sounds were very different for me, because I love noise of all sorts and how they are formulated depending on the structure of a community. I think from that point onwards when I’ve been trying to connect more with the culture, I’ve always been very, very clear with my role and engagement with the local community, but particularly with the arts community, not to do what I call accidental colonialism. That is, to impress upon [local Vietnamese communities] something I feel I’ve got that’s greater that they ought to do. And I think it would be a huge disservice to this particular generation, as the country has been evolving economically, which means that the current generation are freer to be curious, to explore. Being an artist who sits into the “others” group, because we don’t have a box of our own as Vietnamese artists [in the West], we just sit into “others”. As someone who’s been displaced and sits a little bit on the outside, I’m sensitive to this notion of contemporary arts, or art in general ‘belonging to the West’ according to main stream narrative.
I sometimes think at the moment in developing nations, like Vietnam, they tend to look outwards, believing that the prevailing narrative is correct, and that the prevailing narrative is that contemporary dance belongs to the West. But that stifles their ability to think and free themselves, because most likely they’ll keep emulating the West. That is counter to what I believe the philosophy of contemporary art and contemporary dance is. For me, the definition of contemporary dance is a democracy of voices and ideas and that’s where we have so many forms that have been enveloped and embraced. Street dance and ballroom dance can be contemporary dance, and that’s where people get confused. Sometimes I try to separate aesthetic from the philosophy of the form. For me, the philosophy of the form is an unwritten constitution – as a community we believe we have embraced your voice as a female artist, and my voice as a male Asian artist in Vietnam, we’re equal. Whether your work is bad or good, that’s a different conversation. But the philosophy, the beauty of the philosophy is that our voices are equal. So I can embrace street dance and hip hop and ballroom and folk dance into the form, because that means that what I have to say is no longer bound by hierarchy or nepotism.
Like everything, we’re trying to rebel against classicism where only some art forms are high art and some art forms are just common forms. That is not the philosophy. The philosophy should be that if you are living in a developing nation, whatever you have to say is equally as important as what I have to say. That’s it. That is the beauty of contemporary art. I try to be very clear in my engagement to say, this is just my access. Your access might be different because you might be thinking differently, you might be impacted differently, and that is okay, and that’s the beautiful part of the community of contemporary dance itself, so that emergence of new ideas can happen rather than spending decade after decade of emulation. Where one could be innovating just based on the fact that one is creative.
Having served as Artist-in-Residence at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) from 2010 to 2012 and as Head of Contemporary Dance from 2019 to 2023, in what ways have the ongoing changes in Hong Kong influenced your artistic work, if at all?
I love Hong Kong, it’s like my second home. I have lived there for almost a decade, engaging in some capacity. I recognise the complexity of the city, the complexity of the political situation. From my perspective, you cannot discuss what has happened in the erosion of certain things, without also noting the kind of instrumental damage that has been done as a result of the colonialism that has happened. Obviously, the British in spite of what the narratives claim to be, weren’t amazing as dictators of that region either. That’s where the conversation gets really precarious. But I can say, having observed my own country, that all societies start to have huge risks and imbalances. As you can see from the kind of social unrest that happened there [Hong Kong], when governments cease to listen to the will of the people, that [unrest] is exactly what’s happened. And so, yes, the direct answer is yes, it [Hong Kong] has impacted my work tremendously, having gone through that whole experience where I had lived there before when it was a different type of Hong Kong. And I think the narrative at the moment is from the government side, so about what the government sees rather than what the people see. The government sees that they are not censoring and the people obviously don’t feel that, mainly because the government is about policies. They’re making policies that although they say are not censorship, the people are indicating that it is because one has to filter one’s thoughts. That in itself is the definition of censorship. It feels like they’re speaking over each other instead of talking with each other.
What really resonated with me and has permeated through the work into Exquisite Noise itself was during social unrest. At some point, the crack down on the demonstrations [in Hong Kong] was so vast that one could not make any comments in any direction because no-one really found a way to communicate or find resolution. Words became precarious and dangerous to say, because they could be construed in any direction. And so what happened during that period was that people took to noise as a way to express their displeasure or comment on how they felt. Every night at 8pm, everyone in the city made a huge ruckus with any object they could out the window. And so the city was cacophonous with these kinds of noise distortions. This was quite impactful.
At a similar time, I think a little bit before that in Myanmar, when the coup had happened, people took to the streets with pots and pans, with whatever they could, just to make as much noise as possible because they themselves could no longer utilise words. Words became politically charged. And this happened in South America and throughout history. It’s important because noise doesn’t belong to anybody. It belongs to all of us. And anyone can pick up a sound and express themselves where words become politically charged or can be misconstrued or manipulated. Noise is the next course of expression that we could take. And so I think these events have partially informed Exquisite Noise to really look at noise as a form of activism, a way to bring attention to a subject that is really urgent for us to discuss. For me, I use noise to cut through with clarity and certainty.
This is a topic that we must look at now, because it may not be there tomorrow.
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Exquisite Noise will have its London premiere at The Place on Friday 10th October 19:30.