There is no main character. Everyone appears to be a passing extra, drifting in and out of a scene with a disorienting and unstable perspective: a shadow curled into a black hole, a tilting plank, an overturned table, a crooked ladder, or a car flipped upside down. Everything accumulates like raw data awaiting a long-form fictional narrative—or possibly a draft storyboard for a serial drama that cycles through a maze of intertwined events and plot turns. Surprisingly, it is precisely through these scattered and chaotic bits that we see glimpses of a whole generation's silent struggles, exposing shards of a collective memory about what was once an "unwilling promised land." Though it was a destination no one opted for and few could avoid, as if exiled and deprived of memories of a lost home, there is yet hope for a new homeland. A quirk of fate underlines the prospect of a whole new belonging?!

Alongside a series of dzo paper drawings, this open studio also presents “99% Tetris Game | the cold war is over… almost,” an interactive video game work by Lê Đ.Chunh. Tetris (Тетрис), the iconic puzzle game where tetromino blocks (composed of 4 squares) fall from the “sky,” was created in 1984 by Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov. It became the very first video game exported from the Soviet Union—unexpectedly becoming a global phenomenon, especially after reaching American players through Nintendo’s Game Boy. Lê Đ.Chunh, too, grew up with memories of handheld gaming consoles and sibling rivalries over playtime. Borrowing the 1988 U.S. marketing slogan for Tetris—“The Cold War is over... almost”—the artist has created his own absurdist version of the game. In place of clean geometric blocks, he uses fragments from daily life: hoes, sickles, sandbags, cattle, plants, pots, rubber sandals, silhouettes of residents… all cut from photographs he captured around the stone walls of the old tea factory. Like in Tetris, the pieces fall into a fixed screen; the player can rotate or move them sideways, but because there’s no unifying geometry, they never quite align. There is no neat fit, no completed lines, and no score. The fragments simply pile up—off-kilter and unresolved—in a system of illogical self-cancellation.

The work gently links personal memory with broader historical shifts—from a transforming local landscape to the distant echoes of a crumbling world order—not to interrogate or conclude, but to propose a wry scenario: when pieces never fit, how long can the game go on—and for what reason?

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Stubborn and still—the stone wall never yielded, never crumbled, nor could it be torn down, despite the ravages of war and the churn of time. Once, it was merely a forgotten colonial remnant, too obscure for anyone to name or trace. And yet, from its silence, a roof was raised, a well was dug, and a childhood was tenderly nurtured. “Following the stone wall,” thus, to Lê Đ.Chunh, is no longer just a gesture of personal remembrance but perhaps a long journey through overlapping strata of memory, tracing around the ruptures of history—an undiscovered zone that opens up to endless possibilities and re-imagination.