Issue #62

Winter 2026

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers

Cover of Issue #62

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference. The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.

Editorial team

Contributing Editor

Ahn Vo maura nguyen-donohue Lumi Tan

Editor-In-Chief

Joshua Lubin-Levy

Assistant Editor

Nicole Bradbury

Managing Editor

John Arthur Peetz

Design

John Philip Sage Carlos Romo-Melgar

Articles

71-75

Drawings

This series of paintings originates from the artist's concern for migrant workers and homeless people. Referencing real-life images, historical events, and popular culture, the works send the dreams of these...

78-83

Young Birds, Youngbloods, and Shameless Shamans from Strange Mountains: Curators Thảo Hồ and Hải Nam Nguyễn with artist Việt Lê on Southeast Asian spiritualities & sexualities

Thảo Hồ: This is a snippet of a conversation that I had with curator Hải Nam Nguyễn and artist Việt Lê at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. We talk about...