Arte Fare is an art fair project founded by Trong Gia Nguyen in collaboration with Chilllala, in which participating artists and galleries take turns presenting their work over four days. We will participate by revisiting, modifying, and developing new works from Beneath the Membrane (2025), continuing our research question: How can mixed media installation practice explore intergenerational and cultural gender norms in Vietnam? And how can collaborative processes between husband and wife subvert such norms? The project therefore extends an existing practice-led investigation while placing it within a new public and art-market context.

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The project begins from the understanding that gender norms operate simultaneously as social standards and pressures, while their boundaries remain unstable (Hoang, 2021). Butler challenges the assumption that sex is a fixed and natural category, arguing that its apparent stability is produced through regulatory and discursive processes (Butler, 1999: 10).  These processes are also embedded within everyday socialisation, through which culturally constructed expectations shape expressions of femininity and masculinity (Bilton et al., 1983: 148). Moreover, while the cultural and creative industries are often praised as open, diverse, and egalitarian, persistent inequalities in gender, race, class, and disability remain (Conor, Gill & Taylor 2015).

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Our methodology is grounded in mixed-media installation and collaborative making. We investigate how gendered experience can emerge through materials, domestic life, memory, and the process of making itself. Materials such as aluminium from household kitchen objects, beads, photographs, books, and ceramics are drawn from our everyday environment. Acts of care, personal memories, and intimate emotions are transformed into material and visual forms through which gender norms can be examined. The collaboration between husband and wife is equally important. The process of making together becomes a way to question how gendered expectations may be reproduced, negotiated, or disrupted within an intimate working relationship.

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Arte Fare provides a significant context for extending this research because it places these intimate and domestic investigations within the structures of the art market. Although the gender gap in representation at art fairs is narrowing, differences in commercial value continue to persist (Art Economics, 2026: 79). This creates an opportunity to consider not only who is represented, but how gender may intersect with visibility, valuation, and commercial value within the Vietnamese art context. The project therefore uses the art fair not just as a site for presenting completed works, but as a context through which questions of gender and value can be further investigated.

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The spatial structure of Arte Fare also contributes to this investigation. Trong Gia Nguyen’s use of the swastika as the organising form for four exhibition spaces creates an environment that operates between art fair and exhibition. We understand this structure as an opportunity to experiment with how spatial organisation affects the encounter with, and meaning of, artworks. Following Steeds’ discussion of the exhibition as an expanded aesthetic space, where display and audience experience contribute to the production of meaning (Steeds, 2014: 13), the exhibition itself becomes part of our research. In this context, the project asks how gendered experiences, materials, relationships, and forms of value are transformed when they move from intimate domestic space into the public and commercial space of an art fair.