Đường chỉ

The Đường chỉ* series introduces Vietnamese versions of critical, engaging texts indicating a diversity of creative thoughts, theories, and forms of practise. Every two weeks, we release a Vietnamese version of a text originally written in English. The endeavour is to facilitate critical discourse about thinking and practising creativity today by building up a collection of open access resources for Vietnamese artists, art enthusiasts and critics.

*Notes for our English language readers: Đường chỉ means ‘thread’, like the red thread of Ariadne that promises to guide the way for those who hold it through the convoluted labyrinth. This Western image, enduring for its implication of the mind, holds very well in Vietnamese language, for chỉ (‘thread’) means as well ‘to show’, ‘to point out’, and ‘to indicate’; đường (here a classifier for ‘thread’) is in itself a noun meaning a variety of lines: ‘road’, ‘street’, ‘route’, ‘path’, ‘way’. So if one takes the word đường as a noun, one can interpret đường chỉ to mean literally ‘the path/way of thread’. And to push it further, if one sees the word chỉ as a participle adjective, then đường chỉ now signifies “the indicated way”.