Spatial and Spiritual Returns: A Performance Lecture and Panel with Vicky Đo, Janet Hoskins and Việt Lê

This hybrid performance lecture, panel and conversation spans creative and critical interventions in Southeast Asia, its diasporas, and worlds beyond. Join Vicky Do (artist; curator, Sàn Art, Sài Gòn), Janet Hoskins (Professor of Anthropology and Religion, University of Southern California, LA) and Việt Lê (artist, writer, curator; Chair, Visual & Critical Studies, California College of the Arts, SF) as they share their insights on conjuring artistic and religious communities (Cao Đài, Mother Goddess). They will also discuss their varying approaches towards contemporary aesthetics, ethnography, and enchantment.

Bios: Vicky Do is an artist and curator based in Saigon, Vietnam. Her works have been featured at the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival (2015), the Urban Nomad Film Festival (Taipei, 2015), Hanoi Docfest (2017), Seoul Media City Biennale (2018), The Factory Contemporary Art Center (Saigon, 2018), and Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019), among other institutions. She now works as a cocurator at Sàn Art, an artist-run art organization in Saigon. Her curatorial practice ranges from community learning to making exhibitions and art books. Past curated programs at Sàn Art include (Re)imagined Choreography, a Situationist International–inspired media workshop (2020); Journey to the Southwest, a community outreach and research project in the Mekong Delta (2021); and Waiting for the end of wind, an exhibition of the paintings of Nguyen Thai Tuan (2022). She is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts’ International Art Leadership Fellowship (2019–22).

Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She has done extensive field research in Indonesia, Vietnam and California, as well as shorter periods of research in Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia and archival work in the Netherlands and France. From 2011-2013 she was the President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Her current research interests are the emerging field of Transpacific Studies, post colonial studies, transnational religion, visual anthropology and ethnographic film, material culture, indigenous theories of time and history, gender, exchange and ritual.

In 2014-2015, she has published two new books: the edited collection (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (2014) and The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015), both from University of Hawaii Press.

Việt Lê is a queer, disabled academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past two decades centers on sexualities and spiritualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional, cross-ethnic coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Association of Asian American Studies’ Outstanding Achievement book award for Media, Performance, and Visual Studies. The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with artist | theorist Latipa (2nd edition, Candor Arts + Memory and Resistance Laboratory + Sming Sming Books). Lê has presented their work at Civitella Ranieri, the Shanghai Biennale, among other venues. They co-curated transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min: ARKO, Galerie Quynh, UC Irvine Gallery; YBCA, 2008-09), the 2012 Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, and trầnsfiguration (Slash, SF 2023).

A 2022-24 Headlands Bay Area Arts Fellow and 2022 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow, Lê has also received fellowships from the Teiger Foundation, Fulbright-Hays (Việt Nam), and Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France).