Fig. 1: The Kiều Constellation. A living map of the diasporic and transnational vectors connecting contributors to The Kiều Complex, The Kiều Reader, and the Kiều Salon. Currently spanning 17 countries, growing as the project develops.
THE PROJECT
How can a 200-year-old poem resonate with the Vietnamese diaspora today? Tracing Kiều takes that question as its starting point.
Tracing Kiều is an independent art and literary initiative in dialogue with The Tale of Kiều, (Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du, c. 1820) — widely regarded as Vietnam’s most celebrated literary work and one of the great epics of world literature.
Led from Berlin, the initiative brings together artists, writers, scholars, and cultural practitioners from the Vietnamese diaspora and from Vietnam, working across contemporary art, literature, performance, and critical discourse.
The name holds a resonance: in Vietnamese, Thúy Kiều — the epic’s protagonist — Việt kiều — a term sometimes used for the Vietnamese diaspora — and cầu kiều — bridge — share the same sound, though each carries a different origin; the convergence is accidental but telling. The project takes this proximity as its premise: the poem, the diaspora, and the possibility of connection between them are its subject, its method, and its form.
The project unfolds across three strands: The Kiều Complex, a contemporary art exhibition; the Kiều Salon, a modular public program; and The Kiều Reader, an anthology and critical companion.
The Kiều Complex
A contemporary art exhibition featuring international artists from the Vietnamese diaspora
The Kiều Complex is the exhibition strand of Tracing Kiều: a group exhibition bringing together 16 artists from the Vietnamese diaspora — across four generations and nine countries.
The project takes The Tale of Kiều as its curatorial matrix, an analytical instrument through which the participating works become newly legible — and through which the epic itself is read anew.
The Tale of Kiều centers on Thúy Kiều, a woman of exceptional talent who sells herself to save her family, endures fifteen years of hardship and separation, and eventually returns on her own terms. Constraint and agency, loss and transmission, rupture and belonging remain irreducibly entangled in the epic. These tensions make it a precise point of reference for the participating works — formal and structural, not just thematic.
Four thematic fields drawn from the poem’s verses — Form & Fate, Transaction & Agency, Rupture & Rumor, and Ritual & Return — inform the exhibition’s curatorial logic. Curatorial interventions throughout the exhibition open points of entry for visitors encountering the epic or the history of the Vietnamese diaspora for the first time.
The exhibition is accompanied by the Kiều Salon, bringing even more voices from the global Vietnamese diaspora to a diverse public (see below).
Berlin is the project’s starting point for a reason: nowhere else in Europe do the migration histories of the Vietnamese diaspora overlap as densely — from students sent to the East and West Berlin from the 1950s, to refugees received after 1975, to contract workers recruited to East Germany from 1980 — legacies that continue to shape Germany’s largest Vietnamese community today.
2027 marks a convergence of anniversaries across these histories — among them, roughly fifty years since the height of the Boat People exodus in the late 1970s.
Funding for The Kiều Complex is currently being sought, in cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin.
Kiều Salon
A public program of talks, readings, and performances across multiple venues and formats
The Kiều Salon is a modular series of talks, lecture-performances, readings, concerts, and film screenings, taking place across multiple venues before, alongside, and beyond the exhibition itself.
Multilingual, multigenerational, and oriented toward diverse audiences, it brings artists, scholars, community practitioners, and visitors into shared space — addressing the Vietnamese diaspora as a global formation shaped by colonial history, displacement, and transnational life across generations.
The Kiều Reader
A hybrid publication of poetry, essays, interviews, and artworks
The Kiều Reader is an independently financed hybrid publication, bringing together literary, artistic, and discursive work from the Vietnamese diaspora and from Vietnam in dialogue with The Tale of Kiều. Contributions are drawn from an international call and direct invitation, and resonate with the poem thematically or formally.
The Reader is organized around the same four fields — Form & Fate, Transaction & Agency, Rupture & Rumor, Ritual & Return — which also resonate throughThe Kiều Complex exhibition as guiding verses from the poem woven through the space. English is the primary language; Vietnamese, German, French, and other original languages appear within selected contributions.
Conceived as an autonomous publication with its own editorial logic and international circulation, the Reader stands independently of the exhibition while remaining in dialogue with it.
250–300 pages, full color.