One Month in Da Nang

Creativity, Community & Collaboration: Our inaugural residency in Vietnam

Mar 14, 2025

EXPERIMENT Residency is exactly what it sounds like – a creative experiment. Founded by Sho Neary and Kora Kwok, two artists who live on different continents and work across borders, EXPERIMENT is a global residency committed to fostering meaningful cultural exchange between artists and local communities.
EXPERIMENT welcomes creatives from all disciplines – who are not just here to create, but to collaborate with and contribute to the places they inhabit. Each iteration of the residency is shaped by its location, responding to the people and environments that make each place unique.

Over four unforgettable weeks in Da Nang, Vietnam (Jan 16 - Feb 13, 2025), EXPERIMENT’s inaugural artist residency brought together 10 artists from around the world – with roots in Ireland, Thailand, England, Hong Kong, the US, and Germany. Our cohort spanned 10+ disciplines, from painters and tattoo artists to writers, fashion stylists, and sculptors.

Going into Da Nang, we set out with a few big questions:

Could we build creative bridges in a city we’d never visited before?
Could we support our residents in both their personal practice and a community-based project?
Could we foster a culture of experimentation, encouraging artists to try new mediums, styles, and approaches?

Did we succeed? Let’s take a look.

🧪 What We Accomplished

🎨 7 murals, transforming city walls across Da Nang

Lulu (Ohhi Ohno) and Sho worked with local organizations and businesses to beautify walls across the city, including locations such as GreenViet (a local conservation NGO), Not Pop, ChuAn Coffee, and Pins Cafe.

💃 3 creative workshops, free and open to the public

Angelica hosted two figure drawing workshops at different spaces in the city, open to people of all levels.

Jeremy & kora 🌊 hosted a movement-and-writing event that explored how the flow of movement transitioned into words on paper. Participants were given guided journaling prompts following two hour-long sessions of ecstatic dance.

For all three artists, this was their first time running these workshops – an experiment in itself!

🗣️ 1 audio storytelling project + 📸 1 street-style fashion project launched

Monika Jiang launched Oneliness Voices, an audio storytelling project that invites people from around the world to reflect on their experiences of loneliness and connection.

Katie captured the street-style fashion of Vietnamese locals through the lens of a film photography series.

📚 1 book draft + 1 book proposal completed

Kora finished the first full draft of his book, and Rachael completed her book proposal on women and Mexico’s agave culture.

💡 1 sculptural installation built

*untitled (year of the snake) by kora & marijana*

🖋️ 5 tattoos inked + ✍️ 4 essays written + 🐍 3 artists featured in a local exhibition, celebrating the Year of the Snake

*lulu, marijana & kora all showed work at space garden’s snake exhibition*

We also published 3 artist interviews on Instagram, giving a closer look at our residents’ creative journeys.

🌱 Collaborations & Community Partnerships

This residency was made possible through partnerships with local organizations, including:

Not Pop (graffiti supply & street art hub)
GreenViet (conservation NGO)
Space Garden (experimental event space)

We’re incredibly grateful to Rob at Not Pop (who also runs Nam Jam, a local street art festival) for guiding our muralists around the city, and helping them find spaces to paint. We’re also indebted to Jemma & Tram at Space Garden, who have created a wonderful space in Da Nang for creative experimentation and expression, and given us a home for many of our events.

🔮 Looking Forward

This experience deepened our understanding of cultural exchange, community engagement, and the impact of public art. We’ve proven that it’s possible for artists to further their personal practice while also engaging in community projects, and in many cases our residents were able to combine the two. We also learned the importance of sustainable partnerships and the power of collaboration in transforming creative visions into reality.

What’s next?

For future editions in Da Nang, we’d love to integrate local artists into the residency. Without a pre-existing network in Vietnam, this first edition was challenging in that regard – but now that we’ve built relationships in the Da Nang community, we’re excited to make it happen in future editions.
We also want to make workshops more accessible to Vietnamese-speaking locals. While we included Vietnamese descriptions in event marketing, we’re considering hiring translators to further bridge the language gap.
Over the next few months, we’ll be running more residencies, applying for grant funding, and bringing more voices into the mix.

Thank you to our residents, partners, and the Da Nang community for making this inaugural residency unforgettable.