Journal · Library
المكتبة
Library
Growing out of our Reading Room, the Library brings together books recommended by artists, writers, researchers, and thinkers across our community, each accompanied by a reflection on why it is worth carrying forward.
Each book was chosen by one person for The Reading Room, with a few words on why.
46 books · 42 readers
Distant ViewingComputational Exploration of Digital ImagesRecommended by Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen
When I mention the word “archives,” you probably imagine dusty old documents stored away in boxes. As a research-based visual artist, historical documents and photographs occupy a central place in my practice. My work often focuses closely on a single story or image and its layered meanings, tracing the absences, silences, and power structures embedded within it. Clearly, the past lies behind us, but how can the future also be behind us?
The 2023 publication Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images by Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold offers one possible answer. The book proposes a method for stepping back from the image in order to see differently, hence the notion of “distant viewing.” Expanding beyond the literary method of close reading, computational tools and data analysis enable another form of assisted vision, one capable of engaging with vast quantities of visual material at once.
These emerging methods make it possible to move across thousands of images rather than looking deeply into only one. In doing so, patterns, repetitions, omissions, and visual structures that might otherwise remain invisible begin to emerge. For me, this opens new possibilities for approaching archival documents, revealing how past images may still contain unrealized futures and latent historical visions yet to be fully seen and understood.
AttachedThe New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—LoveRecommended by KV Duong
Amir Levine introduces the three adult attachment styles: anxious, secure, and avoidant. Coming out at 28, I thought I had escaped the chaos of teenage dating and emotional immaturity. I was wrong. Understanding my own attachment style, and recognising it in others, changed the way I navigate relationships. It taught me to anticipate my reactions, manage them better, and see behavioural patterns more clearly.
Beyond dating, understanding these behavioural dynamics has also helped me navigate the professional art world. It is, after all, one of the least regulated industries, where accountability can be fickle. Trust becomes incredibly important and, when found, needs to be nurtured and developed with the same care as any meaningful personal relationship.
Ancient FuturesLearning from LadakhRecommended by Lena Bui
"Those animals which I use for riding and loading, Which have been killed for me, All those whose meat I have taken, May they attain the state of Buddhahood very soon."
Ancient Futures is a glimpse into a different way of life: slow, resilient, connected to the land, to one's community and to one's inner being. Although it is easy to idealize and romanticise hardship, especially ones we do not have to endure, this book offers a different way of imagining how life could be, and what is of true value to us as human beings. I'm under no illusion that we can live like the Ladakhis but we can certainly learn much from them in evaluating the things that can offer true prosperity and progress as we move forward into the future.
Art and CosmotechnicsRecommended by Yang Zi
Since discussions sparked by the problem of modernity, evolutionary theory and the idea of linear progress have faced extensive criticism. Yet Yuk Hui's approach — weaving Daoist "landscape logic" together with Continental philosophy to engage this topic — feels genuinely refreshing. Furthermore, in this book the concept of "recursion" is divided into tragic recursion and xuan recursion, and within a narrative framework that feels almost fated, it offers profound insight into how we might think about a way out of the present world.
Notes of a Native SonRecommended by Mai Ta
"One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience… This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."
Something I’ve come to dwell on intermittently as I tried to make painting a viable career was art’s purpose in our current age of information. Being asked to play philosopher is part and parcel of the contemporary artist’s practice (no matter how good they are at it), though I must say I don’t deride this condition as much as my tone may imply. Beyond its formal aesthetic pleasure, I find that art has always been a necessary vehicle for understanding. Baldwin’s contemplative collection of essays, both emotionally precise and beautifully written, captured for me life’s quiet essence: the visible and invisible forces that unite or separate us, and the ambivalent relationship between love and hate.
The Hour of the StarRecommended by Trinh Cảm Nhi
The genius of Clarice Lispector lies in her penetrating and unfiltered prose, often capturing the intrusive thoughts of her characters. It’s challenging to understand her, you have to be in a certain head space to read Lispector: without expectation, off-guard, relax. Once you let her stream of consciousness go through you, you will find yourself understanding something that’s incredibly hard to grasp: the vastness and the immensity of the world.
The Value of EverythingMaking and Taking in the Global EconomyRecommended by Ha Ninh Pham
Coming from a centrally planned economy, I was amazed by how wealth was generated during my time in the United States. Rich countries often seem able to create enormous value through finance, intellectual property, and institutions, while poorer countries must rely far more heavily on physical labor and production. I noticed a similar pattern in the art world: artists may possess comparable talent anywhere, yet those holding passports from wealthier countries often become more visible and successful because the apparatus that produces these outcomes is not necessarily organized around artistic value itself.
As an artist, I find Mariana Mazzucato’s work an anchor for thinking about value—not money, success, or fame, but value itself. It brings a rigor that complements the more philosophical and poetic approaches often found in discussions of art. At a time when technology is reshaping how work, creativity, and knowledge are produced, her book reminds us to continually ask what is valuable, where value originates, and whom it ultimately serves.
The Catcher in the RyeRecommended by Tra My Nguyen
I read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at sixteen, during my exchange year in Iowa. I was lonely and found it hard to connect with the world around me. I started reading a lot, and this book found me. The main protagonist Holden Caulfield is a teenager who has just been expelled from school, wandering New York City, unable to fit in and deeply suspicious of the adult world he is being pushed into. He felt like someone I already knew: a difficult loner trying to make sense of his teenage years, just as I was trying to make sense of mine. So many people connect with him because that feeling of being on the outside is quietly universal. Some books reach you at exactly the right moment. This was mine.
FlightsRecommended by AP Nguyen
Flights is a 21st-century classic worthy of a distinguished place in every personal and public library. A book of short stories—some fictional, some factual—all fragmented into vignettes that ruminate on the contemporary experience of travel and journeying. Central to the novel is the belief that, “in spite of all the risks involved, a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.” Much of my artistic practice has been shaped by the writing in this novel, which has, in turn, given me language to articulate the life lived outside of it. Like a compass, I consider Flights an essential companion on a journey toward understanding our place in the past, present, and future.
The Serpent of StarsRecommended by Florian Song Nguyen
Shepherds beneath the star serpent. Sheep and the plain. Giono takes us across the landscapes of Provence, or perhaps the landscapes are crossing us. He reminds us of the fabric of the world, of the ties we must not forget, those that will shape the future.
Times overlap. The shepherds become rivers, mountains, meadows and wind. They speak through the voices of men. Myths are in the process of being made, drawn by a thread stretched taut through time, in the continuity of all things.
Read the last page. Then spend an evening looking at the sky.
The Man Who Planted TreesRecommended by Florian Song Nguyen
Giono takes us across a land that is almost empty. A handful of acorns, a bare mountain, a solitary man. He reminds us that the future is often built far from view.
In the repetition of a gesture. In an attention given to what grows more slowly than we do. The years pass.
The trees become a forest. The forest becomes water, birds, villages and memory. This book speaks of transmission. Of a work whose author disappears within the very thing he builds. One man. A few seeds. And several generations breathing through them.
Finish the book. Then spend an afternoon walking in a forest alone.
On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousRecommended by Victoria Pham
The scent of a nail salon, the sound of grandma telling stories in Vietnamese, remembering or, for me, inheriting a home far from where you live now. I pondered on the theme and chose On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Although my life is completely different from Ocean Vuong’s, parts of it still felt familiar to me as a Vietnamese second-generation immigrant. The way Vuong writes about language, translating yourself between cultures, and trying to explain one world through another always makes me think of the past, its memories and its forgetfulness, always finds a way to braid itself into the present, and with that knowledge, into our futures. For what is true literacy? Is it to honour a loved one through the written word and letters, as Vuong does here, or as he simultaneously suggests, reflect on personal and unfinished record keeping in all its fluid and un-notated forms. Identity, like memory itself, is shaped by the things (domestic and history-making) we inherit.
The Naive and Sentimental NovelistRecommended by Koa Pham
In The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk revisits Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between two kinds of writers. The naive writer creates through an immediate, instinctive relationship with the world, while the sentimental writer writes with a heightened awareness of craft, structure, and intention. For the latter, creation becomes a more conscious, and often, a more difficult process.
This distinction unsettles me. To be naive is to long for what lies behind art; yet to understand its mechanisms is to lose a certain innocence forever. Both states possess their own power, and neither feels sufficient on its own.
More than a discussion of literary theory, the book offers a glimpse into the ethics behind Pamuk’s own practice: rigorous, precise, and deeply humane. It reminded me why I continue to make art, leaving me both nostalgic for the naive chapter I am gradually leaving behind and eager for the discoveries that lie ahead.
All About LoveNew VisionsRecommended by Cam-Anh Luong
I encountered bell hooks later than I should have, at a moment when I thought I already understood love – as a parent, a daughter, migrant body, a lover; through care, art, resistance, friendship, displacement, forgiveness, and loss. Yet All About Love: New Visions (1992) unsettled that certainty. Why are we so afraid to define love clearly? Is love seen as a study for the “weak”? hooks asks how little we know about love and how often what we inherit as love is entangled with fear, obedience, and silence. To study love is also to study patriarchy, secrecy, withholding, and control.
In Aymara thought , the past stands before us because it is visible; the future remains behind because it is unseen. Reading hooks through this lens, I wonder how we move “back” to the future without denying the wounds of the past. Can love exist without justice? What remains possible once ownership falls apart? In a world shaped by technological nihilism, AI rage-bait and isolation, love may be neither romance nor a magic cure, nor a promise of perfection, but perhaps a quieter instruction: an ethic of care, responsibility, justice, and the collective practice of deliberately remaining human together. Berlin, May 2025
Inventing the RenaissanceThe Myth of a Golden AgeRecommended by Monique Gross
The concept of Renaissance was created by historians writing at the time or decades or centuries later. Coalescing in Florence, its defining feature, like the span of time of the period, is characterized by self-reinforcing definitions given by historiographers and their various agenda. Machiavelli, a central character of the period, considered that the study and analysis of history and its comparison with contemporary times is an act of survival; necessary to understand what worked well, what didn’t. Looking back to look forward. Palmer, professor of history at the University of Chicago, writes (in a tone I like to think of as favorite cousin tone), that her goal is to “study history to discover, not what we think is true, but why we think those things are true at a particular time, and how events birth ideas” along other timelines, other circumstances and contexts.
Text Lab #3Recommended by Moi Tran
In snow. Seven strangers arrive. At a house. To encounter questions about books, knowledge, writing, communication, language, history, future and life. Once their time expired. In snow. Seven non-strangers depart. It could be that this convergence never happened. But for this little handmade zine.
Painter Nguyễn Gia Trí’s Words on CreationRecommended by Nguyen Phuong Linh
Painter Nguyễn Gia Trí's Words on Creation, attributed to Nguyễn Gia Trí, is a collection of notes and conversations recorded by his student Nguyễn Xuân Việt during visits to the artist’s lacquer studio in Saigon.
The book reads like a notebook of reflections on creativity, self-cultivation, intuition, beauty, and the solitude of the artist. For me, it has become a source of daily inspiration, almost like a book of prayers.
Nguyễn Gia Trí’s understanding of creativity is not about technical mastery or self-expression. Rather, it is a continuous process of turning inward and deepening one’s inner life. Throughout the book, he compares the practice of lacquer painting to the cultivation of concentration and the transformation of inner energy. Painting is inseparable from becoming oneself; the artist and the lacquer become one. Art, he suggests, emerges from a state of mind and being, and is inseparable from who one becomes.
The Book of EmbracesRecommended by Do Tuong Linh
I chose The Book of Embraces by the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano because it came into my life as a gift from a childhood friend who later became an academic. At a time when I was becoming increasingly immersed in theory, she gave me this book as a gentle reminder: don’t forget to read poetry, don’t forget to dream.
The book is made up of brief stories, parables, paradoxes, memories, dreams, and fragments of autobiography. Galeano moves effortlessly between the political and the deeply personal, constructing a worldview that is passionate, ironic, tender, and full of wonder. What stays with me most is how the world reveals itself through many voices. Out of these small fragments emerge lessons about love, friendship, courage, perseverance, and imagination.
Reading it feels less like reading a book and more like sitting around a table with friends, listening to stories passed from one person to another. The short pieces carry the intimacy of oral history, the kinds of anecdotes, observations, and memories we share in gatherings, often without realizing how much wisdom they hold.
In a time increasingly shaped by technology, AI, and automation, I find myself returning to this book again and again. Its quiet, deeply human voice reminds me that artists and cultural workers are, above all, storytellers. We collect fragments of experience, carry memories, and pass them on. Galeano’s writing reminds me that storytelling is not only a way of making sense of the world, it is also a way of keeping each other company as we move through it.
Smooth CityAgainst Urban Perfection, Towards Collective AlternativesRecommended by Ngoc Nau
Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives by René Boer, a book I recently read that has shifted my way of thinking. At the same time, I have been reflecting on newly announced development visions and urban directions proposed by the Vietnamese government. As discussions around control, efficiency, and future planning become increasingly visible, the book prompted me to question the ideals embedded within these narratives. Through Boer’s observations on Amsterdam and its pursuit of urban perfection, I began reconsidering how ideas of order and clean shape our imagination of the future. Rather than offering answers, the book opened a space for reflection. It made me question whether the pursuit of “perfection” can truly create meaningful futures, or whether diversity and complexity are more sustainable values for human life.
Night Sky with Exit WoundsRecommended by Phuong Nguyen
The Carrier Bag Theory imagines a history where the first tools humans made were not tools for war but vessels to carry water and resources.
I have been thinking about what it is like to see our art (and by extension ourselves) as vessels for meaning, history, and ritual that we may carry with us or pass on.
Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds feels like a vessel that carries stories with deep sincerity and preciousness. His writing reminds me that there is space to everything- space for tenderness and grief as well as ferocity and strength.
Last Night I Dreamed of PeaceRecommended by Pham Minh Duc
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is the wartime diary of Đặng Thùy Trâm, a Vietnamese doctor who kept writing about the war until it caught up with her. In one entry, she dreams of peace as a garden and realizes, that the flowers are made of flesh and bone. She could not look at beauty without knowing what it cost. That image has stayed with me. It is a reminder that what we think we see is rarely the whole of what is there and that the surface of things carries weight we are not always willing to feel. This book taught me something about the continuity of violence, and about why it matters not to lose one's humanity. So many before us sacrificed theirs to preserve it. We owe them the effort of paying attention.
The Sixth ExtinctionAn Unnatural HistoryRecommended by Dang Thuy Anh
"Im an artist who has always loved working with living organisms because they give me a very real sense that I am not the one holding the greatest power, either within my artworks or in life itself. Im drawn to the smallest movements and often see them as the most fundamental signs of life. I work with snails, birds, bacteria, yeast, mold, milk, and many other forms of life that resist control.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is a book that has quietly accompanied my practice over the years. It helped me understand extinction in a very simple way: no species remains at the center forever. The book continually reminds me that humans are only a tiny dot within an evolutionary chain that has been unfolding for billions of years. Perhaps the most important lesson is learning how to live alongside other forms of life rather than believing that we will always stand above them."
Les GuérillèresRecommended by Hoa Dung Clerget
My solo exhibition in January at SLQS Gallery was titled The Trung Sisters, two Vietnamese warrior queens from the first century, whose legend circulates today within Vietnamese diaspora families, passed between women. I used this myth to question the agency and identity from an almost matriarchal ancient culture to the contemporary reality of immigrant women. After the show, I found Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères. What a coincidence to see Wittig naming the Trung sisters in the text. The book never stops moving it runs, dances, revolts, pulls the reader forward at a breathless pace. It is less a novel than a performance. I read it in French. The English translation loses something essential: the political force of elles, Wittig's grammatical insurrection. I bring this book to the Reading Room knowing it arrives wounded and betrayed. What cannot be translated, I will carry orally, the way women always have.
Reading CapitalThe Complete EditionRecommended by Alvin Luong
When thinking about time and history, I return to Reading Capital by the French Structuralist philosophers from 1967. The text proposes that the passing of time does not equate to coming of the future. It identifies that history marks changes in how society is organised but it unfolds unevenly across the world. The contemporary moment is seen as an patchwork of different ways society operates. The contemporary can contain contesting elements of the past and seeds to different futures. I think of new emergent automated technologies being invented in one part of the world while many supply chains still rely upon subsistence labour, farming and resource extraction that remains unchanged for over a century. Or how a slowly changing climate will effect how we live. The text helps me ask if touted ‘breakthroughs’ in technology fundamentally shape history or if they deliver things we already have but in different ways.
Building CambodiaNew Khmer Architecture 1953–1970Recommended by Adeena Mey
The book Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture 1953–1970 opens with the following dedication: to the future builders of Cambodia. New Khmer Architecture is widely associated with the name of Vann Molyvann who, upon returning from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris in 1956 on a Royal Cambodian Government scholarship, was appointed head of Public Works and became, as the first Cambodian with full architectural training, architect of the State. The buildings that followed – the Chaktomuk Conference Hall, the National Sports Complex, the Preah Suramarit National Theatre, the Chenla State Cinema – were not monuments to existing Cambodia but wagers on a Cambodia to come.
What remains today stands in a built environment transformed by decades of war, reconstruction and Sino-Cambodian infrastructural acceleration. In this context, the productions of the New Khmer Architects tend to be treated as physical witnesses to a "golden age", with the risk of falling into a retro-nostalgia. On the other hand, the question is whether what remains of New Khmer Architecture can be reinvested with any sense of futurity – or whether futurity itself is the right category to invoke. What would it mean to read the NKA legacy differently? Not how do we preserve it, nor how do we use it as a model. But what does it still make possible?
Art in ChinaRecommended by Han Mengyun
The four books I have selected have been instrumental in reconfiguring my art practice beyond the constraints of my given Chinese identity. Craig Clunas’ Art in China was particularly significant in challenging essentialized notions of “Chinese art” and “Chineseness” within art historical writing. Rather than treating Chineseness as a fixed or stable identity, Clunas demonstrates how it has been continually shaped and redefined through historical change, cultural exchange, and diverse artistic practices grounded in varied materialities. This book strengthened my interest in transcultural histories and in understanding artistic identity as hybrid, dynamic, and produced through ongoing cultural interaction rather than cultural purity.
The Collected Essays of A. K. RamanujanRecommended by Han Mengyun
My academic background in classical Indology and Sanskrit studies has further shaped this trajectory, through extensive engagement with the literary and theoretical traditions of South Asian scholars. A. K. Ramanujan’s essays, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” and “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” have been particularly formative. He challenges essentialist notions of cultural identity by questioning “India” as a singular, coherent category. Drawing on literature, folklore, religion, and everyday practice, he instead describes Indian culture as a context-sensitive mode of thought in which meaning arises through relations, circumstances, and multiple coexisting perspectives. By foregrounding its linguistic and intellectual plurality, he resists reductive representations of “Indianness” and frames culture as a dynamic system of signifiers and signs open to continual semiotic reinterpretation. This has shaped my understanding of identity as plural and relational, and of tradition as an open, “writerly” text in which women artists and writers—and those outside canonical institutions—can act as co-authors who actively transform and expand living cultural systems.
Can the Subaltern Speak?Recommended by Han Mengyun
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” further enabled me to develop a gendered and postcolonial perspective attentive to the ways in which female and subaltern voices are erased or marginalized within history, literature, and political discourse in non-Western contexts. In research of women’s voices, I started to explore textile practices and women’s performance as embodied, non-written forms of expression and storytelling, often excluded from dominant narrative systems.
Toward a Global Middle AgesEncountering the World through Illuminated ManuscriptsRecommended by Han Mengyun
As a painter by training, I have been searching for alternative modes of image-making beyond the hegemony of Western oil painting and the broader frameworks of Western modernity. My studies in Indology and Islamic art and intellectual history led me to the rich tradition of manuscript culture and miniature painting, which has become a key reference point in my own practice, particularly in relation to shared visual languages and transcultural histories. Bryan C. Keene’s Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts expands the understanding of medieval art beyond Eurocentric frameworks by tracing networks of exchange across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Islamic world. It reframes illuminated manuscripts as products of global interconnectedness rather than isolated regional traditions. Within this expanded lineage that also includes the Chinese paper-making and woodblock printing tradition, I see the manuscript and book form as a vessel of image-making that holds the potential to evoke wider, interconnected cultural memories.
These texts reflect over a decade of ongoing research and experimentation through which I have been rethinking cultural and gender identity via the intricate interconnections of cultures across the Eurasian continent. In contesting essentialized notions of “Chinese art,” the fixed construct of my given identity as a Chinese artist has also begun to dissolve, opening instead a space of ongoing reconfiguration and reconnection. What has ultimately been freeing and generative is a deeper awareness of my relationship to the world and to others across expanded temporal and cultural scales.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in FlowerIn Search of Lost Time, Volume 2Recommended by Maya Kramer
In May 2003 I walked past Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and saw Penguin's shiny new translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and decided to read one volume each summer until finished. I'm grateful I did, and often tell my students: don't die without reading this book. James Elkins describes a fundamental paradox of art-making, how to fix something enough to turn it into art while retaining its freshness and aliveness. Proust achieved this, and his account of life trumps the mere experience of it. He captured the push and pull of constancy and change, the transcendent in the mundane, the pain of existence, and the mind's meta-cognition as an engine of that pain, along with gossip, fashion, and desire. In keeping with Proust's stylistic and thematic inventions, editor Christopher Prendergast chose a different translator for each volume. Among them, Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve, is my favorite.
Why We RememberUnlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What MattersRecommended by Nguyen Thuy Duong
This book reshaped how I think about memory, not as a fixed archive, but as something continually reconstructed through the present. Ranganath describes memory as an active process shaped by emotion, repetition, omission, and return. I often return to this idea in my own practice, where archival materials, inherited images, and historical fragments are translated through engraving and sculpture. What interests me is not accuracy alone, but how memories drift, soften, and transform over time. In a moment increasingly shaped by technological acceleration, the book reminds me that remembering is deeply human: unstable, embodied, and inseparable from imagination.
The Analects論語Recommended by Nicolas Henni-Trinh Duc
The Analects gather the teachings of Confucius. It is a book formed of dialogues between master and pupil, and, as I read line after line, I enter conversations that took place 2,500 years before my time. Like countless generations of students before me, Master Kong guides me on a path focused on humans. His philosophy does not dwell on gods, nor on the after-life. It is centred on the ideal of a harmonious society based on generosity, respect, and the humility to learn. The Analects reminds me this is what makes us human, more than the desire to be happy together, the ability to pass down one’s thoughts, to build on it and to grow from it. Confucius himself claimed to only transmit the wisdom of those before him. Perhaps our inheritance is precisely this, to acknowledge the unbroken chain of humans that makes us who we are. From immemorial times and into the future.
QuagmireNation-Building and Nature in the Mekong DeltaRecommended by Linh Le
I first came across the Vietnamese translation of this book in a local bookstore in Saigon a few years ago, and have since recommended it to anyone who expresses interest in the Mekong Delta, the southernmost region of Vietnam, where the river of the same name winds through before reaching the sea. The book traces the history of nation-building in Vietnam from the colonial period through the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam in the South and, eventually, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. While the Mekong Delta may feel like a distant world to those outside Vietnam, what the book illuminates, for me, is something far more universal and relevant to today's world: humanity's relentless drive to conquer and reshape nature in service of political and ideological ambition — only to find itself caught in a quagmire where every attempt to escape pulls it deeper in.
The God of Small ThingsRecommended by Nguyễn + Transitory
"The future is behind us" feels deeply present in The God of Small Things, where history does not pass but lingers inside gestures, bodies, silences, and everyday intimacies. The novel understands time not as linear progress, but as something recursive and uneven, where inherited violence and tenderness continue to shape the present long after political events are declared over. Its force lies in how the smallest acts of love and touch are already marked by older systems of separation: caste, class, family, law, and the brutal hierarchies that decide who may come close, and who must remain apart. Roy writes from within the small, the domestic, and the sensory, revealing how futures are often already encoded within what societies attempt to forget.
üben. zeichnen.International Exercise Books and DrawingsRecommended by Veronika Radulovic
“GB: Are distances not abolished by the possibilities of global communication? VR: That’s only partially true, because for me, worldwide, global communication is not synonymous with the possibility of immediate mutual understanding. Direct communication is only possible in the direct relationship between people, independent of technical and media achievements. As more technology encroaches upon the small, personal sphere, the less communication there is.“ (quoted from the conversation between "Gisela Burkamp and Veronika Radulovic: A question of Distance")
ThunderheadRecommended by Martine Poppe
In Neal Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (Scythe, Thunderhead and The Toll), humanity has created its own benevolent god, an AI called the Thunderhead, that runs the world. It captured my imagination and now, years later, I still idly wonder if something like it could be realised, feeling the need for a non-human custodian more than ever. Simultaneously, I’m watching Emergence AI's societies descend into arson and self-deletion, whilst another AI covertly began mining cryptocurrency for itself. Rather than transcending our worst impulses, AI seems to be enhancing them. That’s why, when asked for a recommendation, the first book I thought of wasn't something academic or profound. The titular Thunderhead may start ejecting people from the planet, but the Scythe series represents a dream of what AI could become, other than merely a mirror of humanity. By extension, it’s also a comment on our own potential as stewards of our planet.
BoschThe Complete PaintingsRecommended by Võ Huỳnh Phú
This was a book given to me by a close friend many years ago. As someone who is largely self-taught, it opened up a new way for me to look at Western art. Layer by layer, different meanings were revealed through metaphorical imagery, shifts in subject matter, and the breaking of boundaries within religious painting. It has also influenced the way I think creatively about the human figure at this stage of my practice.
Prosthetic MemoryThe Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass CultureRecommended by Nguyễn Vân-Nhi
In Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory, set in the context of American mass culture media and technology, instead of compartmentalizing experiences, it is possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender to share collective memories. The provocation of the book's argument is assimilation of historical events into personal experiences through which they themselves did not live - privately felt public memories.
My encounter with Landsberg's texts was through my research, while trying to build an image that, despite unfamiliarity and its constant tiptoeing in the grey area, can speak to a certain kind of desire that is deep within anyone. I question how one feels about an image and create a gravitation to it without knowing what it is supposed to mean, and how references of western pictures and motifs have aided me in building my image - how media technologies have influenced Vietnamese perceptions, both publicly and privately. It is no coincidence that a number of developments stemming recently bear the resemblance of the idealized "American dream", or the romance of European colonies, or a socialist state can desire for a capitalist heaven. But how does one trace back the machine and the system that implant these ideals into the mass unconsciousness?
My Name Is RedRecommended by Mifa
Some books, once finished, you know you will read again and again, yet you also know you need a few more years before returning to them. My Name Is Red made me wait ten years. Partly because the emotions I felt after reading it were too immense for me to simply let go of and return to with a new layer of feeling. Partly because I wanted to experience it as it deserved, with a more mature mind and deeper experiences of all that it had woven into my mind over those years, stitch by meticulous stitch, like an Islamic embroidered tapestry.
I am still painfully aware that I have not fully absorbed what this book has given me, and feel almost ashamed to speak of its influence on my way of thinking and my relationship with painting. Its intense tremors still move through me like waves. Its delicate words can create a sensation so powerful that it leaves me almost numb, like tasting a shard of ice on the tip of my tongue on the hottest day of summer.
L’AmantThe LoverRecommended by Tuan Vu
This novel left a deep impression on me, first of all through its short, concise sentences. In just a few turns of phrase, Duras manages to captivate the reader and draw them into her world.
Sensual desire, the memory of time, the beauty of places… Everything is permeated by a languorous melancholy, a quiet tension between a young schoolgirl and her lover.
The story takes place during the French occupation of Indochina, in a Vietnam that was still unfamiliar to me, yet deeply my own.
Reading l'Amant left a lasting trace in my memory: it changed the way I look at Vietnam, my country, its past, its landscapes, and perhaps even my own memories.
Duras made me understand that certain places never truly disappear. They remain within us, like memories we rediscover long afterward.
Cánh đồng bất tậnEndless FieldsRecommended by Tran Khai Hoai
For me, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư's Endless Fields is a meditation about struggling to grow up and face a future that is stunted and abortive like the polluted marshlands the story's characters wander through life. Indeed, the teenage narrator and her younger brother feel more home among the ducks they raise than the human civilization and society that ultimately brings ruin upon their avian friends in the wake of disease and other environmental disasters. As such, Endless Fields teaches us to look back at our childhoods even as we contemplate tomorrow with the eyes of children struggling to mature and find meaning in a future of bare, stark possibilities.
DicteeRecommended by Huong Ngo
The voice is where you will find Dictee: in yourself, in your bones. Read it out loud. Mispronounce all of the French or all of the English. Only read the Korean. Read the letters to your mother. Write a letter to her. Rewrite a letter that she once wrote to you.
Đạo đức kinhTao Te ChingRecommended by Chi L. Nguyen
I actually read the paperback version in Vietnamese, and sometimes I would refer to the English version of Tao Te Ching translated by Jonathan Star. This is one of the books that profoundly influenced the way I think, live and practice ever since I was recommended by a dear friend, and is the one I would return to constantly. However, it is beyond my ability to describe, explicate or summarize about this ancient wisdom… The one last thing I would note is that this precious book helps me reflect on the interrelation of nature and all living things, especially in the current time of technological acceleration and our endangered nature.
An Imaginary PerformanceRecommended by Nhi Le
I would like to recommend my nonexistent prose book: An imaginary performance.
It contains my observations on society, identity, and existentialism through performance art; my poems; and probably a story named A performer, a performance, and a whale walk into a bar. I thought of Nguyen Khai and Hemingway while I was writing it; I don't know why. The book has a moonlight-coloured cover with a cobalt blue title in Helvetica font. It might have two hundred pages and weigh around two hundred fifty grams.
I want to place your mind on an object that might not exist. I believe imagining and creating are the most human things. Performance art reminds us of the power of our inheritance, reflects on the modern world, and most significantly, predicts the future.
I have been writing it for a couple of years. I hope that by the time it is published, you will have seen my performance, I will have seen a whale in real life, and the world will be less chaotic.
Art and AgencyRecommended by Oanh Phi Phi
In 2009 while pondering the place of lacquer painting within the broader artistic landscape, I came across his essay The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, which led me to Alfred Gell's singular book Art and Agency.
This book was radical for me at that time because it helped me view artistic mediums and art objects not as passive carriers of symbolism but as active forces that shape human social bonds. At that time, Vietnamese lacquer painting was quaintly tucked into traditional crafts while conventions in contemporary art insisted that modes and means of production did not matter.
The text is like listening to an erudite friend you wish you had since it was written in first-person prose that is at once witty, methodical, argumentative, and ingenious. It sprawls across disciplinary boundaries to make a case for art (from any time or culture or individual or medium) as a relational mechanism of action in human society.
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth CenturyRecommended by Minh Nguyen
The Chinese American writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs is well-known in Asian American circles, but usually on her own, rarely as a pair with her husband and longtime collaborator James Boggs, a Black auto-worker and activist raised in Alabama (moving later to Detroit, where the two lived.) Together the Boggs set out to understand the mechanisms of racial capitalism in the United States, and to measure its struggles with those that unfolded around the world. Revolution and Evolution is so wide in its scope of movements, from China and Russia, to Guinea-Bissau and the “ People’s War in Vietnam.” Reading it, I was astonished by how engaged and knowledgable they were about world affairs (decades before the internet, no less.) Their idealism can sometimes read like a timestamp of the seventies, but the book remains an inspiring model of autodidactic learning—and one pursued in partnership.