THE PROJECT
In dialogue with The Tale of Kiều
Tracing Kiều is an independent art and literary initiative in dialogue with The Tale of Kiều, (Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du, c. 1820) — 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 project unfolds across three interconnected strands, each independently developed and collectively oriented toward the same question:
How does a 200 year-old epic speak to a globally dispersed diaspora today?
Last updated: [June 11, 2026]
The Kiều Complex
Group exhibition and public program
The Kiều Complex brings together 16 artists from the Vietnamese diaspora – across four generations and nine countries. The project takes The Tale of Kiều as its curatorial matrix: not as subject matter or illustration, but as an analytical instrument through which the participating works become newly legible — and through which the epic itself is read anew.
At its center is Thúy Kiều, a woman of exceptional talent who sells herself to save her family, endures fifteen years of displacement, 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 merely thematic.
The exhibition is accompanied by the Kiều Salon — a modular public program of readings, performances, conversations, and film screenings.
2027 marks a convergence of significant anniversaries in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany — a context the Kiều Salon addresses directly.
Funding for The Kiều Complex is currently being sought, in partnership with Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin.
For inquiries: mail@tracingkieu.net
The Kiều Complex Reader
Hybrid publication — in development
The Kiều Complex Reader is an independently financed hybrid publication bringing together literary, artistic, and discursive contributions in dialogue with The Tale of Kiều. Moving between literary anthology, artist reader, and critical companion, it gathers poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, conversations, and visual contributions by writers, scholars, and artists from the Vietnamese diaspora and from Vietnam.
The Reader takes the poem as its organizing matrix and unfolds through four fields drawn from its verses: Form & Fate / Transaction & Agency / Rupture & Rumor / Ritual & Return. 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.
Kiều Salon
Public discourse and performance program
The Kiều Salon is a modular series of talks, lecture-performances, readings, concerts, and film screenings running alongside and beyond the exhibition. Multilingual and multigenerational, it is oriented toward audiences beyond the conventional art world.
The program brings artists, scholars, community practitioners, and audiences into shared space — addressing the Vietnamese diaspora as a global formation shaped by colonial history, displacement, and transnational life across generations.