A Day in the Life: Phạm Minh Hiếu

Innovation, craftsmanship, and immersive installations

A Day in the Life is a series by A&M where we invite artists to share a day in their life through images accompanied by brief descriptions.

Phạm Minh Hiếu.

Phạm Minh Hiếu creates immersive installations that blend speculative realism and new materialism. Using a wide range of materials, from traditional crafts like lacquer to nanofabrication, his work explores the intricate relationship between time and contemporary existence. In 2021, Phạm founded Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu in Hanoi, a space where he collaborates with a diverse team who take on roles as artists, architects, designers, technicians, scientists, and researchers. Together, they explore new ways of making, questioning the boundaries between disciplines and the perception of reality.

In this article, Phạm offers readers a glimpse into his day-to-day activities as he works on a series of artworks for an upcoming project.

Phạm Minh Hiếu, Frame of Reference (2024), installation view at the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Image courtesy of Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu.

Last year, I had the honor of representing Vietnam in its first national pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale. My artwork, Frame of Reference (2024), references Bình phong (Folding screen), created in 1939 during a transformative period in Vietnam by the legendary lacquer artist Nguyễn Gia Trí. The artwork is an apparatus to navigate one’s entangled relationship with their context, so the lenticular print panels of Frame of Reference require viewer inclusion—as people walk alongside the screen, the Red River ripples and cityscapes reveal their depths, just as any true meaning of our contemporaneity must lie in our active participation.

Phạm Minh Hiếu's study. Image courtesy of Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu.

I am a night person, and late night is when my mind attains its peak clarity. Thus, I often start my day right after midnight and only take a break three to four hours later. In these quiet early hours, I sketch, read, and think without interruption in my study. Actually, I do embrace a necessary level of distraction. Meet my midnight coworker, also a night purr-son, Vừng (Sesame)!

Members of Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu experimenting with forms and colors. Image courtesy of Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu.

I am working on a special commission for the 20th anniversary of Tam Sơn, a retailer dedicated to craftsmanship and inspiring lifestyle in Vietnam. This project combines mechatronic engineering with innovative lacquer craftsmanship to create a shape-changing, “theatrical” installation composed of thousands of lacquer units.

By 10 in the morning, my studio members arrive to help me visualise the new ideas I had the night before. We go through multiple iterations of form-finding to achieve the right shape.

Phạm Minh Hiếu in conversation with Hanoia to develop the colour palette for an upcoming project. Image courtesy of Studio Phạm Minh Hiếu.

Bringing my artwork from conception to realisation requires collaboration with various fabricators. I value learning from their expertise and discovering new creative possibilities together.

This time, my collaborator is Hanoia, a contemporary Vietnamese lacquerware company. Around 3 in the afternoon, I have a meeting with Ms. Trà My, Hanoia’s project coordinator, who kindly helps us browse through their impressive material library.

Mr. Vương Sang, an artisan from QMosaic, is working on the layout of the installation by applying mosaic techniques. Image courtesy of QMosaic.

Meanwhile, in Bát Tràng Ceramic Village on the outskirts of Hanoi, Mr. Vương Sang, a skilled artisan from QMosaic, is working on a clay excerpt of my installation for our 5pm meeting. My partnership with QMosaic began with our collaboration on Somewhere (2023), a diptych of polychrome-glazed ceramic tiles. Their distinctive approach to mosaic was invaluable during that project, so I'm delighted to work with them again on this installation.

Today, I will return home with excitement. Despite all the technical challenges, everything is progressing steadily, thanks to the hard work of my collaborators, who trust and join me in my artistic journey.

Visit Phạm Minh Hiếu’s website here or follow him on Instagram here to see more of his works.