"Reassemblage" / Tracy Dong
Berlin, Germany 2024
We begin 2026 with a six-part series centered around themes of place, movement, and conflict. These issues demand deeper human-centered context, as displacement, political instability, and environmental pressure increasingly define daily life for millions.
Tracy Dong’s Reassemblage documents the contemporary Vietnamese-German diaspora in Berlin, focusing on how community is constructed across layered migration histories. The project examines what follows displacement, asking how cultural identity is collectively maintained, negotiated, and reconfigured over time.
Berlin is home to one of the largest Vietnamese diasporas in Europe. Migration occurred through multiple political pathways, including contract labor programs in the former East Germany and refugee resettlement in West Germany. These distinct historical trajectories continue to shape social and generational dynamics within a reunified Germany.
Over the course of a year, Dong photographed gatherings structured around shared meals, storytelling, and cultural observance. These events function as sites of cultural transmission and adaptation, where traditions are sustained while hybrid identities are articulated in relation to contemporary German society.
While informed by her proximity to the community, Dong positions the work as documentation of a broader collective condition. Reassemblage foregrounds shared practices as mechanisms through which diaspora communities reconstruct cultural coherence and continuity.
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About Tracy Dong
Tracy Dong is a Berlin-based, lens-based artist whose work is grounded in memory, resistance, and the poetics of diaspora. Drawing from her Southeast Asian heritage and diasporic lived experience, her practice examines how identity, belonging, and cultural memory are shaped and reshaped across borders and generations. With a principal focus on intimate depictions of marginalized subcultures, she proposes subversion and resistance to oppressive systems through deliberate documentation.
Her first monograph, “Tell Me About Saigon” was published in 2024 by Kris Graves Projects in New York City, and was featured in Huck Magazine and Dazed Magazine. She has studied visual storytelling practices at the International Center of Photography and screenwriting and producing for film at New York University.
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