How did you come up with the idea for this project? 

During my research for this work, I came across "Ghost Tape No.10", which is a recording of PSYOP (Psychological Operations) developed by the U.S. military department in Saigon at the time to scare the Vietnamese soldiers.

I visited different places where they broadcast the tape, and that’s why the articles [in the exhibition] are set in Mo Cay and Black Virgin Mountain. The tape was broadcast via loudspeakers from U.S. helicopters, and from the backpacks of the soldiers. The four-minute track consists of four elements: the funeral music, a child screaming “daddy, daddy come home”, noises of the wind that sound almost Holywood-ish, and the father of a dead soldier talking about how he died, saying: “If you’re still alive, my friend, you should go home.”

Very few people know about this tape. It actually took inspiration from Vietnamese spiritual traditions, based on the belief that when your soul wanders far from your ancestors' land, it will always be restless. Whether the tape worked or not is unknown, but what I thought was interesting about it was the fact that they used psychology as a form of warfare, and in this specific instance, it was related to a ghost, to the spirituality of Vietnamese people.

The film also has footage of your family. What is the connection between these settings - the jungles where the tape was broadcast and your family home?  

I was born in Hai Duong Province but I left for Germany with my mother when I was five. Even though I try to come back to Vietnam every year, I still feel like a visitor.

My family here only remember specific moments when I’m visiting, and the rest of the time when I’m not around, I exist only as an image. There are so many gaps in our experiences together that I've almost become a ghost. I only appear very rarely and then I disappear.  

So the ghost has become a metaphor for the way I perceive my own existence in Vietnam. 

Whenever I'm back, my family in Vietnam usually perform this ritual for me. In the video work, you’ll see my aunties praying. They call on a ghost to take possession of one of my aunties’ bodies, and the ghost will speak to me about my future. For the past two years, it has been mostly about marriage, babies and having a stable financial income, because as you know, as an artist I don't have a stable income.

I thought it was interesting that the image of the ghost shifts from one point of interest to another. If you think about the war, how the Americans used the tape as pyschological warfare, and how in 2017, my family called on the spirit world to talk about contemporary interests and the way I should live my life.

As an artist, you’re asking questions, you’re reflecting on what’s happening within your surroundings, so from a personal perspective, it [spirituality] clearly has an effect. For this exhibition, I’d like to question those beliefs and certain norms, whether it’s gender norms or family structures. 

So it’s a comparison between the two places - the jungle and the domestic scenes - that might appear abstract. 

What about the articles? How do they complement the audio and video installations? 

The articles are sort of like an echo to me, the same way the recordings are an echo to the footage. The newspapers are the more factual way to approach the subject.

I collaborated with Vincent who’s a Southeast Asian correspondent, which was interesting for me because as a German, my main source of information is mostly through European newspapers, and they are what mostly shape my views on Vietnam. 

The article set in 1969 - "Troops employ phantastic new tools in 'Nam" - is fictional in a way because it is based on facts but it never took place. We compiled information that we thought was interesting, for example, about the ghost tape and Nixon. It was written from an American perspective, you can read that through the subtlety of the writing. We purposely tried to report about the Vietnam War at the time to look at the use of language.

The other two articles, "Life plods along in the Mekong" and "Destination: Black Virgin Mountain", are set in Mo Cay and the Black Virgin Mountain where the ghost tape was broadcast, and they were mainly sourced from my own experiences. For the one in 1996 about Mo Cay, we wrote about a farmer living there. The farmers lived remotely and were not exposed to the changes that the cities in Vietnam went through. I feel their story is a reflection of Vietnam's economy. As for the farmers, their life hasn't changed much.

On the other hand, the 2017 article about the Black Virgin Mountain is more about tourism. The mountain witnessed heavy fighting during the war, but today it's a tourist destination. The tourism industry has re-occupied the mountain, reclaimed it for a purpose. There are different myths about the Black Virgin herself, and one of them is that she killed herself by jumping off the mountain over a loveless affair. Her soul is restless, just like the ghost in the tape. Tourism is interesting to us because it plays such a big part in the way Vietnam is viewed from abroad. If you think about war tourism, the Cu Chi Tunnels, and everything about it. 

The newspaper prints are a way to reflect the style of writing and to question that very American perspective, to look at all the different methods of how newspaper articles are constructed to convey a certain truth, and to question our access of information, how we construct fact and fiction or supposedly objective media. 

You left Vietnam when you were very young. Can you talk about your experience as an immigrant in Germany and how that is reflected in your work? 

My previous works deal with Vietnamese disapora in Berlin. I was interested in how the Vietnamese community made a living in a new country, so I looked into the economic forces.

I was doing a few projects on Dong Xuan Center, which is the Vietnamese shopping mall in Berlin. I wanted to find out how the mall serves as a source of income for the Vietnamese community there. The first generation of immigrants didn’t have a university education and their language skills were limited. The only way to sustain a living was to open a business because you didn’t need an apprenticeship or a university degree. 

The Dong Xuan center is the very core of the Vietnamese community in Berlin. The name and the location of the market itself already speak a lot about the North – South, East - West divide, because the center is located in East Berlin [where many Northern Vietnamese lived]. 

So for the project, I listed different recruitment agreements that Germany had signed, for example, with Vietnam, Turkey and Eastern European countries, to invite them to come and work to help Germans to rebuild their country.

I think we forget very quickly how things came about in the past because we are so in the present, and I just wanted to remind people how the Dong Xuan center came into being by remembering different recruitment agreements that existed, that once, migrants were welcomed because they were needed. So that was the statement I wanted to make at the time.

Most of your projects seem to be about the past, about Vietnam.

The Vietnam War is predominantly what I'm exposed to when I'm abroad. And so that’s something, because I'm not living in Vietnam and what I'm exposed to is almost historical. That's interesting for me. 

Vietnam is like a chapter that I needed to explore. When we talk about the Vietnamese diaspora, for instance, there's not much work being done in this field, so I thought I could explore on my own because I'm not tied down to any historical reconstruction of it. But even though a lot of my works have to do with Vietnam, I don’t want to limit myself to what I can work on.

This exhibition is almost like a way to mirror what I saw, rather than judging what I have seen. It reflects the perceptions of being both an insider and an outsider. 

Vietnam, as any other country, is extremely complex and the exhibition strives to keep that complexity. 

"Remote Viewing" is open to the public until September 23 at Nha San Collective, from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Interview by Bao Yen