In 2024, Hiền Hoàng was awarded the 18th Foam Paul Huf Award. Now, Foam proudly announces her solo exhibition Garden of Entanglement, which encourages a multi-sensory reflection on the connection between humans and nature. Her practice is deeply shaped by interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists and technologists which reveal the ambivalent role of technology as both a means to understand nature and a force that distances us from it.

Hoàng’s multidisciplinary practice seamlessly weaves together photography, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Central to her work is the theme of migration—explored not only through the personal lens of her family’s history, but also through the lasting traces of colonialism embedded in nature. In the exhibition Garden of Entanglement, Hoàng explores these narratives through three of her recent projects: Garden of Entanglement, Scent from Heaven, and Across the Ocean.

The eponymous project Garden of Entanglement explores the hidden vibrational life of trees, investigating how they perceive and respond to their environment through motion and sound. With this work, Hoàng shows how trees stand as quiet witnesses to centuries of global exchange. Developed in close collaboration with researchers at the University of Florence and the University of Kassel, the project unveils the subtle dynamics of tree behavior whilst inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship with the natural world. At the heart of the project lies a poetic question: What would trees remember about us once we are gone?

Scent from Heaven investigates the paradoxical relationship between suffering and transformation through the story of the Agarwood tree, a fragrant and highly valued wood native to Southeast Asia. Agarwood, revered for its heavenly scent and symbolic associations with healing and redemption, is formed only after the tree is infected or wounded as a result of human intervention. Scent from Heaven explores the friction between the suffering of nature and humanity’s longing for healing and salvation. As such, reflecting on how beauty and value often arise from destruction and trauma.

Whereas Garden of Entanglement and Scent from Heaven focus on the life of trees, Across the Ocean reflects on human experiences, in particular Hoàng’s aunt’s migration from Vietnam to Germany. Using food as a lens to examine identity, memory, and cultural stereotypes, Hoàng incorporates familiar ingredients like rice and soy sauce to comment on the way Western cultures perpetuate reductive notions of ‘Asianness’ and reduce complex identities to simplistic tropes. Food, which is deeply tied to heritage and everyday life, becomes the medium through which the artist questions how cultural perceptions are formed, sustained, and distorted.

About the artist

Hiền Hoàng (b. 1990) is a Vietnamese-born, Hamburg-based multimedia artist whose work locates itself at the intersection of human memory, nature, and technology. Hiền Hoàng was featured in FOOD! the 63rd issue of Foam Magazine. In 2023, Hoàng was a finalist for the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles for Across the Ocean. That same year, she received an Art Grant from the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media for Scent from Heaven. Building on that project, Garden of Entanglement was supported by an EU Commission S+T+ARTS Art Grant in 2024. Hoàng’s ability to blend ecological narratives with innovative, data-driven artistic approaches earned her the prestigious Foam Paul Huf Award in 2024. Hoàng’s work has been exhibited in leading art venues such as CentroCentro Cibeles in Madrid and at influential festivals such as Les Rencontres d’Arles.

About Foam Paul Huf Award

The Foam Paul Huf Award is an internationally acclaimed photography prize aiming to support generational talents and provide a platform for photographers from across the world. Foam, with the help of an international and independent jury, has rewarded young photographers with this prize every year since 2007. The 2024 jury consisted of John Fleetwood (jury chair, curator, co-head of BA Photography at the KABK and director of Photo, a multifunctional platform in South Africa for the development and promotion of socially engaged photography), Anna-Alix Koffi (creative director, editor and the founder of OFF the wall cultures photo, Woman Paper Visa, and SOMETHING WE AFRICANS GOT), Felipe Romero Beltrán (2023 Foam Paul Huf Award winner), Kathrin Schönegg (curator, and the head of the photography department at the Münchner Stadtmuseum), Sunyoung Kim (senior curator at Museum Hanmi and in charge of leading the open call program MH Talent Portfolio, a programme aimed at fostering diverse collaborations between young artists and the museum).

The Foam Paul Huf Award consists of a prize of €20.000,- and a solo exhibition at Foam. Hiền Hoàng sees her name added to an impressive list of 17 former winners, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Lebohang Kganye, Eric Gyamfi, Daisuke Yokota, Alex Prager and Pieter Hugo.

The exhibition can be seen from 6 June – 10 September 2025 at Foam.

Open daily 10.00 – 18.00 hrs, Thurs/Fri 10.00 – 21.00 hrs.   

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