On Saturday, 7 December at EMASI Nam Long, as part of a program initiated and hosted by Nguyen Art Foundation, Linh Thân, and artist Lê Thanh Thảo led a participatory workshop titled “An exercise in feeling negative space”. In an intimate setting, participants listened, wrote, and co-created poems as a way to respond to – or perhaps gently fill – the silent spaces surrounding Linh San’s ceramic works “nights”.

Words from Tắm Đêm:
Are these blank papers made from ceramic actually… blank? What could’ve been on these pages, what is hiding in between the folds, tucking their shoulders into the corners, now fossilized, forever unspoken? And yet… its silence seems, somehow, so loud.

Linh San’s main practice was the written word before she looked for other materials into which to transfer her poetics. If Linh San attempted to find poetry in non-verbal forms, in this negative space she leaves us with, together, we will attempt to vocalize the unspoken and hopefully, discover what the silence is saying.