‘Tầm Tã – Soaked in the Long Rain’ is the first international survey exhibition of Vietnamese contemporary artist Trần Lương.

Spanning painting, installation, performance, community engagement and institution-making, the exhibition delves into Trần’s life and work. It traces his beginnings as a painter, his move towards conceptual and performance art, and his foundational and complex role within the Vietnamese contemporary art scene and the wider Southeast Asian region. The exhibition showcases Trần’s multifaceted practice; one shaped by political and social transitions in Vietnam, and informed by his multifaceted roles as activist, curator, facilitator, archivist and mentor.

From his lyrical paintings – drawing on memories of a childhood spent on the move and hiding from U.S. bombs in the Vietnamese countryside – to his high-energy single-man participatory performances, Trần’s outputs span a wide range.

Trần is also an active protagonist in Hanoi, and Vietnam’s cultural ecology. His contributions include co-founding the experimental art space Nhà Sàn Studio in 1998, establishing the Contemporary Art Center Hanoi in 2000, and leading the currently active APD Center. Through organizing and curating numerous exhibitions and projects—most notably ‘Lim Dim’, Vietnam’s first performance arts festival in 2004—he has demonstrated his commitment to furthering the place of art in Vietnam and fostering an understanding of the role and responsibility of artists within that context.

‘Tầm Tã – Soaked in the Long Rain’ is curated by Biljana Ciric and co-organised by Art Jameel, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and The Art Gallery of Western Australia, where the exhibition will be touring from 2025 to 2027.

Trần Lương (b. Hanoi, 1960) is a performance and visual artist and a major figure in creating space for critical contemporary art in Vietnam. Among the first local artists to experiment with performance and video, his artwork is grounded in local experience. Active in creating opportunities for artists, Trần co-founded the Gang of Five (1983-1996), which organised monthly exhibitions in alternative spaces. In 1998, he co-founded Nhà Sàn Studio, the country’s first artist-led experimental art space, and curated the majority of its exhibitions in the initial four years. He was founding director of the Hanoi Contemporary Art Centre in 2000, a post from which he resigned in 2003 in protest of government corruption. In 2020 he co-founded the Center for Art Patronage and Development (APD), an organisation focusing on artistic development with the orientation of intersecting activities between artistic development and social development. He has continued to direct APD’s programme since its founding. Among his collaborative projects that take art to the people to generate debate about ways of living are the Mạo Khê Coal Mine Art Project, involving workshops with a worker’s community in a rural mine; and On the Banks of the Red River, which presented interactive performance in an impoverished area of Hanoi.

Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. Ciric was curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, where she presented ‘Walking with Water’, a solo exhibition by Vladimir Nikolic. She conceived of the inquiry for the first Trans-Southeast Asian Triennial in Guangzhou, ‘Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening’ (2021/2022), which led to a collaboration with Trần Lương and a number of partner institutions, which made this book and exhibition possible. Ciric was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residence at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015) and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016). Her recent exhibitions include ‘An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter’ presented by Times Museum, Guangzhou (2019); ‘When the Other Meets the Other Other’ presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); ‘Proposals to Surrender’ presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017); and ‘This exhibition Will Tell You Everything About FY Art Foundation’ in FY Art Foundation space in Shenzhen (2017).