Vicky Do
Vicky Do is a curator and an independent media artist, whose works focus on the displacement of people, urban planning and archival practices. Graduated from Texas Tech University as a Visual Communication major, and got her MFA degree in Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, she has artworks exhibited, film screened and public talks in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam. She is a member of Archive of the People (Hong Kong), a collective that takes an investigative look on history, social and political issues and makes artistic responses in return. She is a co-founder and curator of Đường Chạy, a research-based art project that helps emerging Vietnamese artists to realise their research through art making.
Vicky now works full-time as an assistant curator at San Art, one of the longest running contemporary art initiatives in Saigon, Vietnam. She’s also a fellow at the 2020-2021 Future Leaders Programme, sponsored by Australia Council for the Arts.
🄼 Do you have any routines that are helping you during this period of isolation and social distancing?
🅅 I'd like to still wake up at the same hour as usual (before 7:30 or 8am) and carry out my morning with watering my plants, making coffee and doing a tiny bit of work. I feel like if I didn't do that, I would have stayed in bed the whole day. Oh, and I try to stay away from Netflix during the day.. so only Netflix from dinner onwards.
🄼 Do you have any current podcast or reading recommendations for artists (or anyone)?
🅅 Podcast: I've been listening to 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗮𝗶𝘄𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 from Ghost Island Media created by a friend of mine, Emily Wu, and her team of young and talented scholars. If you're interested in Asian politics and Taiwanese politics, disputes and relationship with the US, China and within the region, this is a great way to learn.
- Book: I don't have any new books to recommend but if anyone's interested in comic arts, or zines, I'd like to recommend 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗵𝗼𝗶'𝘀 works from Hong kong. I've been such a big fan of his works and thought people should know about him.
🄼 Do you have access to your art studio? If not, how has this affected your practice?
🅅 I work at home so luckily the situation doesn't affect me that much. :)
🄼 A lot of people have been taking this time to slow down and cook. Do you have any recipes or food ideas to share?
🅅 I live alone so most of my meals are simple haha, nothing that y'all haven't known, but I've been cooking several fish stew dishes recently. Very simple, can be any kind of fish of your choice, a bit of ginger, garlic, red chillies, 3 table spoons of fish sauce, a bit of sugar, simmer them all together in medium heat, taste to your liking, add green onions and serve with rice.
🄼 Vicky - Can you tell us a bit about your experience with the Coronavirus in Vietnam? How has daily life changed over the past 2-3 months?
🅅 My experience with the Coronavirus might sound a bit overreacting at first when there were only cases happened in China before the Lunar New Year. I started buying surgical masks, soaps and some hand sanitisers for my family. But life was still normal in Vietnam at that time and people and my co-workers would laugh at me for being panic. Things changed drastically for the past few months and in these past weeks, we saw closure in businesses, transportation and witnessed our city being almost shutdown. Art workers have been working from home since art galleries (probably belongs to entertainment category according to the government) had to close until further notice. We hope to bring some of our inventories online so people can look at it, but mostly there's nothing much we can do at this point. I've been looking into the financial situation at our organization and been looking to secure some grants in the future. But everything's been extremely slow here and the best we could do is to slow down and not panic.