SLQS Gallery
Free and RSVP essential
Saturday 18 July 2026 11am-2pm | Sunday 19 July 2026 2-6pm
As part of the exhibition No Place Like Home III and Whitechapel Gallery's Backyard Biennial: East, curators Hoa Dung Clerget and KV Duong invite the public into their Vietnamese immigrant garden for two days of workshops, artist talks, and shared gatherings on 18 and 19 July 2026.
Participants are welcomed to sit on floor cushions and inhabit a suspended moment of rest. The programme unfolds through a series of sessions combining informal presentations, poetic workshops and collective discussions, with themes drawn from diasporic memory, language, and transmission. At its heart is an invitation: to gather around a cup of Vietnamese tea, to listen and to share.
SATURDAY 18 JULY | 10am- 2pm - Free and RSVP essential
10am - Artist Panel Discussion: Presentation of the collaborative work by Hien Hoang & Hoa Dung Clerget, followed by a presentation of Alvin's practice.
12:30pm - Vietnamese Bites & Discussion
SUNDAY 19 JULY | 2-6pm - Free and RSVP essential
2pm : Industry Panel Discussion with Moi Tran, KV Duong & Vivien Chow
4pm: A Letter to Special Ones: A writing workshop led by Koa Pham & Hoa Dung Clerget
5pm: Vietnamese Tea & Discussion
Artist Pannel Discussion
Presentation by Hiền Hoàng, Hoa Dung Clerget and Alvin Luong
Hiền Hoàng and Hoa Dung Clerget sit down in conversation to discuss Hiền's research into the landscapes of Vietnam still bearing the ecological consequences of Agent Orange. Working across fieldwork, material experimentation and embodied drawing, her practice asks what it means to witness a violence that is slow, multigenerational, and still unfolding, in the soil, in bodies, in matter. The discussion will open onto Gardens of Kin, their shared collaboration in which the same attentiveness to living organisms is brought to the plants of the Vietnamese diaspora in London. The session will be followed by a presentation by Alvin Luong on his practice.
Industry Pannel Discussion with Moi Tran, KV Duong and Vivien Chow
How artists navigate the concept of Home and the Unhomely in this politically charged climate? Moi Tran, whose work explores the embodied and often invisible dimensions of care labour through sound, rhythm, and gesture, and KV Duong, whose paintings on latex trace the Vietnamese diasporic queer experience through personal and ancestral histories, draw on their respective practices to reflect on what it means to make, inhabit, and lose a sense of home, in conversation with Vivien Chow, whose expertise in Southeast Asian art and artists brings a vital critical lens to the discussion.
A Letter to Special Ones
Writing workshop led by Koa Pham and Hoa Dung Clerget
Writing workshop led by Koa Pham and Hoa Dung Clerget
Before social media, before video calls and instant messaging, there was the letter. For the Vietnamese diaspora of the 1980s, it was often the only thread stretched between two worlds: between those who had left and those who had stayed.
Artists Koa Pham and Hoa Dung Clerget open the workshop by sharing letters from that era: intimate, family, and collected documents that invite reflection on what writing allows, withholds, and transforms. Drawing on the figure of Kim Dong, a young postman who became a symbol of resistance during the French colonial period, participants are then invited to write, in their turn, a letter to their own family. Whatever the distance, geographical or generational. Whatever the language.