Overview

đây/đó (here/there) explores how transnational collaboration in the Asia-Pacific can sustain craft knowledge, cultural heritage, and livelihoods in a time of ecological and social precarity. Bringing together critical scholarship and creative practice, the book examines cross-cultural exchange as both a possibility and a problem: a space for reciprocal learning and innovation, but also one that can reproduce colonial hierarchies of cultural value. Centered on four in-depth case studies of collaboration between Australian and Vietnamese makers and designers, the book traces innovative practices across fashion and textiles, ceramics, and furniture-making. These projects emerged in response to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and foreground adaptation, recovery, and sustainability in its cultural, social, economic, and environmental dimensions. By situating contemporary Vietnamese craft and design at the heart of the analysis, the book challenges Western-centric discourses that privilege ""fine art"" over craft and signals toward decolonial approaches to making and knowledge exchange. Attentive to mobility, tradition, and longstanding ecological practices, đây/đó (here/there) offers new ways of imagining craft, creativity, and sustainability in an interconnected world--speaking to scholars, practitioners, and anyone interested in intercultural creative futures.

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9781956313321

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Grace McQuilten is an art historian and curator of Anglo descent based in Naarm/Melbourne, with familial connections to Vietnam via her Vietnamese Australian partner and children. Rimi Khan is a Bangladeshi Australian researcher whose work examines diversity and sustainability politics in the creative industries and who has lived and worked in Saigon, Singapore, and Naarm/Melbourne. Becky Lu is a British Vietnamese Chinese multidisciplinary artist currently based in Saigon. Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo is a Vietnamese Australian artist and educator, practicing in Naarm/Melbourne. Tammy Wong Hulbert is a Chinese Australian artist, curator, and lecturer of arts management, also based in Naarm/Melbourne.

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