This exposition addresses the role of nhạc vàng (yellow music)—a form of Vietnamese popular music—in identity formation among Vietnamese women in diaspora through three video essays.
While returning to the pre-1975 repertoire, and also exploring the characteristic style of the record production, the project has sought ways to challenge the rule systems of this music, and break this cultural bubble, with the aim of reviving this cultural heritage, and also seeking to fill it with new meaning for new generations of overseas Vietnamese.
This exposition comprises three video essays, which engage with these aims in different ways. These video essays are built on analysis of the process of creating several recordings, as well as of the interviews with female immigrants, and also on documentation of the work of Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and her Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones. The video essays give voice to a group of immigrants who live in a liminal space between Vietnamese and European identity, which indeed also are rules and socially constructed value systems. And it also proposes that intercultural music may constitute a means for bridging the divide between the immigrant and the new home culture.
