A genre of diasporic, postcolonial art practice has emerged in the past two decades to grapple with the detrimental contamination of capitalism and modernisation when anthropology is too academic and too much imagination is impractical. Often grounded in research and an ethics of care and respectful attachment, artists seek to repair the fractures of late capitalism’s drive to optimise actions for speed and productivity, and the impact of migration and extractive development on communities. On view from August 17 - November 24, 2024, Cloud Chamber at Para Site in Hong Kong is one such instance – the exhibition is a collaboration between the Vietnamese artist collective Art Labor (comprising Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran) and the Jrai ethnic minority community from the country’s Central Highlands, the second largest coffee-producing region in the world and the region with the second highest poverty rate in Vietnam.

Cloud Chamber stages artistic encounters as “happenings”, an indeterminate series of activities and occasions that resonate across various post-industrial and late-capitalist contexts. In 2019, as part of the long-term project Jrai Dew, Art Labor collaborated with American performance and video artist Joan Jonas to install a roadside hammock cafe inside the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, connecting the city’s industrial backdrop and the communal, animist Jrai ways of life.

Elements from Jrai Dew anchor Cloud Chamber's aspirations and the collective’s ongoing concerns with mutual learning, while not necessarily presenting their findings as pedagogical. Robusta coffee grown and roasted by Truong's family and their Jrai neighbours is served and colourful hammocks crafted from hand-painted kites invite visitors to linger amidst an indoor courtyard of mixed media and wooden sculptures by Nguyen Phuong Linh, Truong and nine Jrai wood sculptors living and working in the Central Highlands.

While French colonialists first introduced coffee production to the Central Highlands in the 1920s, the Communist government encouraged Kinh (Vietnam’s major ethnic group) settlers to develop coffee plantations in the region as part of the market reform of the late 1980s. In turn, among other consequences, the Jrai population became displaced by migrant labourers from the lowlands who came to work for these plantations, and mass industrial farming has endangered the forests that have long been central to Jrai's spiritual beliefs and practices. Other modernisation efforts in the region, such as the construction of hydropower plants, have since left Jrai farmers dispossessed of their land. The stakes for Jrai's survival are complicated by the Jrai population’s conversion to Protestantism following French colonisation, and Jrai Christians are persecuted by today’s government for pursuing their religious freedom.

At the same time, a moral antagonism against development is not so clear-cut for the ethnic majority and the generation that has reaped its fruits in Vietnam and many post-socialist economies. Tran, who is of Kinh origin, reflected on Jrai Dew in an interview on Terremoto in 2021, “Art Labor could not have the luxury to slow down, contemplate…practice and self-organise activities with different communities if Vietnam hadn’t implemented the modernisation process.” The various aesthetic forms in Cloud Chamber focus on the ecological impact of these forces. However, the stakes of their interventions here would have been more persuasive if the exhibition had foregrounded the more globally connected aspects of internal migration and settler colonialism that are inherent to the same exploitative logic causing ecological harm. Art Labor’s position between different groups and generations should invite discussions on the nuanced relationship with modern progress; and, for example, the pervasive inequality between the Kinh majority and the Jrai minority should inspire reflections on an analogous dynamic between the Han majority and dispossessed Uyghur minority in China.

On a more human scale, Cloud Chamber felt the most vibrant and true to form when it served a live gathering—as at the opening, though the exhibition offered much to look at on slower days. The “cloud” in the title evokes the Jrai belief that after death, human existence will eventually morph into dew and evaporate into a new existence, although, in effect, the sculpture-heavy selection of works grounds the viewing experience in the sensorial rather than the spiritual. The display unfolds across three distinct spaces. The main hall is staged to resemble a village courtyard populated with bamboo musical instruments, wooden pillars (echoing plantations and their impact on local building practices) and folk animalistic sculptures carved by Jrai artists from tree trunks typically used for sculptures displayed outside of tombs during the funerary festival for the dead. At the opening, Jrai artist R Cham Tih’s performance Klek Klok (2024), also a modern version of a traditional instrument that approximates a bamboo harp, played against the backdrop of Nguyen's aluminium installation The Last Ride (2017) that is shaped after parts of an elephant saddle. The hammocks from Jrai Dew were put to convivial use—a palpable relief from the scarcity of free, unregulated spaces to hang out in Hong Kong. Visitors are also encouraged to play on the other bamboo instruments, but during the quieter hours of the week, the dormant elements could seem prop-like and in need of context.

The distinctive carving styles of individual Jrai artists lend the sculptures a joyful presence that recalls the Jrai belief in death as a hopeful release into nature. However, beyond this affective response, it is unclear from the display how reappropriating ephemeral practices as art objects can critically address the greater schisms between preserving Indigenous craft and adapting to modern developments, when heritage itself is not a static object. The minimal interpretation in the exhibition gives a sense that making an organic space for these works is a respectful gesture, but leaving too much open could also be counterproductive to contouring the discursive parameters for these unresolved tensions with ongoing consequences in real life.

The appearance that Art Labor’s interventions are a mere venue for the romantic preservation of material culture is more successfully undercut by Tran’s video installation The Galaxy of Electrified Heat (2024), which depicts the violent experience of modernisation on the psyche. Here, it would be worth mentioning that in addition to the ecological damage and land dispossession brought on by hydropower constructions, the Communist government also weaponised national modernisation narratives to demonise the Jrai for their slash-and-burn farming methods (the “bad” use of nature) instead of exploiting the bountiful natural resources in the Central Highlands for profit (the “good” use of nature). Having grown up in 1990s Vietnam under this propaganda, Tran had to reckon with the cost of this distortion of national progress and history when she later met Truong and the Jrai community he had grown up alongside in the Central Highlands. . Thus, playing ominously behind Truong's rusted fertiliser bag sculpture installation From a land long lost to a land dwindling (2018), Tran’s rapidly cut thermal footage of a landscape surrounding a hydroelectric dam is projected onto curved mirrors encased in steel frames and hung from the ceiling in a turbine system-like configuration. The fuchsia light beaming from the video and refracted on metal can be excruciating to the eye and encroaches on the background even when one seeks respite in the nocturnal dreamscape of Hanoi-based artist Truong Que Chi’s Sleepless Moon (2024) on the opposite wall.

A calmer set of images from another kind of pseudo-scientific distance is presented in Foret, femme, folic (after J.D.) (2024–ongoing), as a carousel projector alternates between Jacques Dournes’ documentary photographs of Jrai culture during his time as a missionary-turned-anthropologist in the region from 1946 to 1970 and Phan’s reinterpretation of the same subjects in watercolour drawings. A matrilineal narrative emerges in the motif of a young woman accompanied by a tiger, a potent symbol in Highlands mythology. The imagistic dialogue between Dournes and Phan integrates ethnographic references and a discursive footnote to suggest alternative sources of Indigenous knowledge transfer. In this activation of archival materials, the juxtaposition between two representations of Jrai culture complicates identitarian notions of narrative. While Dournes could not shed his role as the colonial outsider, Phan is equally a stranger to the locale by being outside of its time.

The anxiety to responsibly engage with indigenous or minority narratives resonates amidst the whimsy of the art forms and the underlying historical and environmental horrors that condition the imagination in Cloud Chamber. The legitimacy of research-based art practices that enable generative ways of preservation also rely on their narrative agency to connect and circulate globally–each reiteration is its own kind of displacement. In this light, the stakes for grassroots or ordinary interventions to rewire the extractive claims on culture are high. Cloud Chamber might feel unfinished at the seams, but it would have been suspicious if it was too neat.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)