When Vietnamese photographer Hiền Hoàng, speaks about her work, the conversation drifts seamlessly between memory, migration, and the silent presence of trees. After spending more than fourteen years in Germany, she has recently relocated to London to begin a Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art, with plans to pursue a PhD. With a soft voice but a deep sense of passion, she recounts how her artistic journey began -from her aunt’s experience as a Vietnamese contract worker in East Germany during the 1980s, to questions of cultural identity expressed through food, to a profound and unique exploration of how landscapes and trees carry traces of violence and memory.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Hiền now lives and works between cultures, moving fluently across photography, performance, installation, video, sound, and scientific collaboration.
Her work often begins with a simple question that later reveals a much deeper level of social complexity. Her entry point was family:
“I began with Across the Ocean, a project about my aunt (…) that work led me to look more deeply at Vietnam. I became interested in silence, in invisible and intangible burdens- how my aunt carried her dream but also the suffering of being the first in her family to migrate, “she tells me.
This body of work earned her a finalist award at the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023.
It is fascinating to hear how she develops her work through a careful and thorough process of research- linguistic, historical, and embodied. Nothing is left untouched or unexamined.
Much of her work grows out of her experience of living between Vietnam and Germany. She often reflects on the expectations placed on her as an Asian woman in Europe, as well as the different pressures she feels when she returns to Vietnam and is expected to fit a certain idea of cultural “authenticity”. This duality of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once has shaped a body of work that is at once intimate and analytical.
“In Asia Bistro, food became a metaphor for burden- a vessel that carries memory, cultural identity and personal history, but also a vehicle of cliché, discrimination, and the weight of being perceived as “the other” when living abroad,” she explains.
In Scent from Heaven, she shifted her gaze towards trees, using them as “metaphors for pain, resilience and memory”. She received an Art Grant from the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media to pursue this project, combining scientific methodologies (CT and EEG) and immersive VR to explore the suffering and transformation of the Aquilaria tree. In Vietnam, the Aquilaria tree produces agarwood, a substance of immense cultural and economic value, only when it is wounded. This paradox – how suffering gives rise to something treasured- echoes the ways in which landscapes themselves hold memory.
“Trees fascinate me because they witness history. Some are hundreds or even thousands of years old, silently observing wars, construction, and the passing of human lives. I once saw a beautiful tree in a French village that turned out to have been used for executions in the Middle Ages. That tension- between the quiet presence of a tree and the violent human history around it, is something I return to again and again.”
Building on this, her 2024 project Garden of Entanglement demonstrates Hiền’s growing interest in the porous boundaries between human and non-human existence. Supported by an EU Commission S+T+ARTS Art Grant, she interrogates the vibrational life of trees through dynamic measurements and sonification. In collaboration with scientists who study plant communication, she explores how trees respond to sound, vibration, and movement, challenging the assumption that nature is silent or passive.
Her ability to blend ecological narratives with innovative, data-driven artistic approaches earned her the prestigious Foam Paul Huf Award in 2024.
Hiền’s work resists simplification. Her art is complex, ambiguous, and intertwines diverse systems- cultural, biological, emotional, and political. In her photography, she treats images as relational spaces, shaped by gestures, sounds, memories, and the bodies that inhabit them.
Listening to her speak, I was fascinated by her reflections on her journey as an artist, at how she navigates the shifting nature of identity, the inheritance of family histories, and the delicate processes that guide her work. She is an artist who listens deeply- across cultures, across languages, and across species- seeking new ways to understand the spaces we share.
How did your artistic journey begin?
Looking back, I think my artistic journey began when I was a child, reading books about the beauty of mathematical forms and looking at pictures of the universe. My father taught me how to draw and paint, and I often sneaked into my uncle’s room, which was filled with manga and art history books. One day, I accidentally opened his film camera and exposed the film to light. I didn’t understand then why he was so frustrated, but that moment, when the image got burn and disappear, made me curious about photography.
Becoming an artist or photographer was never something my parents encouraged. They saw it as a hobby and wanted me to study something more secure for my future. So, I went to Germany to study communication theory. There, I encountered Vietnamese food that tasted completely different from what I knew at home. That unfamiliar taste felt strange but also oddly liberating. It made me realize how identity can shift and transform.
Against my parents’ expectations, I decided to pursue photography seriously. Gradually, my work expanded beyond photography into performance and installation, both indoors and outdoors. I had almost no money for art back then, but I applied for funding for my first outdoor installation. When I received the confirmation letter, and it was the first time I had ever been paid to make art, I knew that this was the path I wanted to follow for the rest of my life.
Your works “Asia Bistro” and “Made in Rice” focus on identity, migration, and societal perceptions of immigrants. Why did you specifically choose food symbolism to address stereotypes faced by Vietnamese and Asian immigrants in Western societies? How does your manipulation of food in art provoke thought about these clichés?
The starting point for Asia Bistro actually came from something very simple: the spring rolls I bought for the first time in Berlin. That small moment made me reflect deeply and eventually led me to photography, and later to art. For me, food is incredibly personal. It reveals who we are: our memories, our culture, even our beliefs. Yet food is also something that can be mass-produced and consumed, often used as a convenient symbol to represent an entire culture, and in doing so, it can become a cliché.
At the same time, food is a lifeline for many immigrants. Selling food is one of the most common ways to survive in a new country. It’s the same for many Vietnamese people who open small bistros in Germany, or for Italian families who opened restaurants when they arrived in America. But these places are not just businesses; they are social spaces where communities gather, where people find a sense of home, and where culture is preserved and passed on.
Because of this duality of food as both preservation and stereotype, I chose it as a central element in my work to talk about identity, migration, and discrimination. In Asia Bistro and Made in Rice, I manipulate food and combine it with inedible materials and action, to question what we really consume when we eat “Asian food” in the West. It’s not just about the spring roll itself, but about the images and assumptions that come with it: how we see, stereotype, and sometimes misunderstand a culture. Through transforming food into something unfamiliar or unsettling, I want to invite viewers to rethink what it means to “consume” culture, and how we might move from cliché to genuine connection and understanding.
You describe your practice as questioning and understanding your identity, asking whether it’s authentically yours or a reflection of being ‘Asian.’ Can you elaborate? Looking back at your work, how do you currently define identity: as fixed, fluid, or something else?
For me, identity has never felt like something fixed. It constantly moves between who I think I am and how others perceive me. When I first came to Germany, I was often confronted with the label “Asian,” as if that single word could describe everything about me. At first, I tried to resist it, but I realized that even resisting means you are still defined by the frame that society places on you. That made me begin questioning what part of my identity truly belongs to me, and what part has been shaped by external projection.
In my earlier works, like Asia Bistro and Made in Rice, I used performance and photography to examine these projections: how clichés and visual stereotypes build a surface image that people expect to see. Over time, my understanding of identity has become more fluid and relational. It’s not something I own, but something that emerges through encounters, between cultures, languages, and histories. In that sense, I see my practice as a continuous act of redefinition. It’s not about finding a stable self, but staying open to the process of becoming.
You have discussed pressures to conform to stereotypes in Germany. In Vietnam, do you face pressure to prove your authenticity or justify choices seen as ‘Western’? How does navigating these different contexts shape your sense of ‘home’ and ‘identity’?
Yes, absolutely. In Germany, I often felt the pressure to represent or perform a kind of “Asian identity” that fit into existing expectations, like being polite, exotic, hardworking, silent. But when I return to Vietnam, I face another kind of pressure: to prove that I’m still authentic, still connected to where I come from, and not too “Westernized.” It’s like living in two mirrors that both distort you differently.
For a long time, this in-between state made me feel unsettled as if I belonged nowhere. But over time, I started to see this tension as part of who I am. The feeling of “home,” for me, has become less about geography and more about relation, the people I connect with, the trees I work with, the languages I move through.
Your work bridges generational experiences, particularly through your aunt’s story as a guest worker in Germany. How has exploring her identity informed your own? Do you see your ability to be more provocative in art as a privilege she didn’t have?
Yes, definitely. My aunt’s story as a guest worker in Germany has been a deep emotional reference in my practice. She belonged to a generation that carried many hopes and sacrifices, but also silence. In the letters and photographs she sent home, she always appeared cheerful, well-dressed, and proud. But behind those images was the suffocation and hardship of daily life: the struggle with language, weather, food, and the constant awareness of being monitored.
When I started reading her letters and looking at her photos, I realized how much of her identity was constructed for others, both for her family back home and for the society she was trying to belong to. That realization became the foundation for my projects Across the Ocean and Made in Rice, where I try to uncover what remains unspoken in such representations.
I do see my ability to speak more openly, to be critical or provocative through art, as a privilege she didn’t have. But it’s also a continuation of her story, or in another sense, something that she and her generation have gifted me. Her silence created the space for me to speak. In that way, my work becomes a dialogue with her generation, acknowledging their limitations while extending their voice into another form.
Language is central to identity formation, especially for immigrants. How does a lack of shared language contribute to feelings of alienation? Are there aspects of identity or emotion that art captures better than language can?
Language is both a bridge and a barrier. I think, for immigrants, the lack of a shared language often means the lack of belonging. You understand things differently, slower, or sometimes not at all. There is always a delay between what you want to say and what you can say. This distance creates a kind of loneliness that is not only about words, but also about how you are seen and understood.
When I moved to Germany, I often felt that my thoughts existed faster than my German. I was constantly translating myself, and through that, I began to realize how language shapes identity. The moment when I couldn’t find the right word, was also the moment I understood how fragile identity can be in a new language.
Art gives me another way to speak through materials, images, sound, and gestures. It allows emotions and memories to be expressed beyond words. What cannot be said can still be felt. In that sense, my practice is also about finding languages beyond language, to create a space where emotion, memory, and perception can be experienced without needing to be translated.
In ‘Garden of Entanglement,’ you translate tree responses into data through scientific collaboration. Have you found scientific methods to be too reductive or even harmful in representing living beings?
Yes, I often ask myself about that question. Scientific methods are of course incredibly useful in helping us perceive what is invisible to our senses, for example, the vibrations, frequencies, or microscopic movements of living beings. In Garden of Entanglement, I collaborated with scientists to record and translate the subtle vibrations of trees into data. It allowed me to sense the tree’s responses to human presence and to environmental changes in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
But at the same time, scientific methods can also be reductive. When we turn a living being into numbers, we risk losing its complexity: its emotions, its history, its memory. A dataset can describe motion, but not necessarily meaning. This realization has been central to my practice: that technology can both reveal and erase.
So, my work tries to move in between. I use data not to claim objectivity, but to create another layer of translation. By turning data back into sound, images, and forms, I hope to return a sense of life and sensitivity to what was first abstracted. For me, art becomes a way to complete what science alone cannot capture: the invisible empathy between human and non-human worlds.
You treat trees as living archives. If a tree could “speak” to you through vibration, growth or decay, what do you think it would say?
Surely trees and plants have a very different language than humans. Science tells us that they communicate through frequencies, chemicals, and electrical signals. Most of the time, we can’t perceive them, and when we do, we often misinterpret them. The smell we enjoy after grass is cut, for example, feels refreshing to us. But it is a distress signal: a warning the grass sends to its neighbors about the injury it is experiencing.
When we speak about “a tree,” I also ask myself, which tree are we talking about? A tree in a city surrounded by concrete, or a tree in the forest, or the tree in front of my parents’ house where I grew up? Each tree lives in a different rhythm, a different network of relationships.
But if I could somehow access their language, I think a tree might treat me as it perceives me, maybe as another tree, maybe as an animal that could either help or harm it. Depending on that perception, it might share with me different kinds of knowledge: which birds or worms have visited, how it speaks with its neighbors through roots and mycelium, or even how my body could one day return to the soil to feed it.
The lifespan of a tree is far longer than ours. Once, I saw a beautiful old tree in a small French village, only to learn that centuries ago it was the same tree where people were executed. What is horror or glory for humans might mean nothing to the tree.
So yes, I would love to understand the trees, but I’m also fascinated by the fact that I probably never will. That distance, that mystery, is perhaps what makes them so profoundly beautiful to me.
Your research-based approach leads you to work with scientists, technologists, and cultural specialists across many media, including photographs, video, installations, VR, AR, and sound. Are there specific artists who particularly inspire you?
Yes, there are many artists I admire, but to name a few who inspire me, I would say Berlinde De Bruyckere, Cai Guo-Qiang, Hito Steyerl, and An-My Lê.
I admire Berlinde De Bruyckere for the way she treats materials as living matter, fragile yet powerful, always carrying emotion and history. Cai Guo-Qiang fascinates me for his use of uncontrollable forces to create moments that are both destructive and poetic. I relate to that balance between control and surrender, especially when I work with data, organic materials, or living systems that have their own agency. Hito Steyerl’s work inspires me in how she questions digital culture and the politics of technology. Her approach reminds me to see media not only as a tool but also as a critical space for reflection.
And An-My Lê is very important to me personally. Her photographs of landscapes and staged war scenes deeply resonate with me. I feel connected to how she navigates being both inside and outside of the stories she tells — something I often experience myself as a Vietnamese artist living abroad.
Your work often explores absences, memories, and the entanglement of the human and non-human. Focusing on these themes, what image, sound, or feeling would you most wish to remain as the lasting trace of your work, even after you can no longer tell its story?
If there is something I would like to remain after my work, I think it would not be an image, but a feeling, the quiet sense of being connected to something larger than ourselves. Maybe it would be the vibration of a tree responding to our presence, or the sound of wind passing through leaves. Much of my work deals with what cannot be seen or easily translated, like memory, pain, and transformation. So, if there were a trace to remain, I would hope it carries that sensibility: that everything is entangled, that beauty and destruction are never separate.
I think the most important thing is not for people to remember me, but to remember a certain awareness, that we live among many other forms of life that also remember, breathe, and endure.
Silvia Donà