Last year marked an impressive year for tourism in Vietnam. A record number of 21.17 million international tourists visited the country in 2025, a 20.4% increase compared to 2024. This far exceeded the global average growth rate of around 5%, as well as that of the Asian Pacific region of roughly 8%.

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How can personal and collective memories – alongside questions of community and heritage – be explored through artistic practices that span different mediums and respond to changing times?

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Hanoi’s infamous train street might be going away if a new municipal plan becomes a reality.

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What if art functions as a visual form for transmitting knowledge and entangled histories, and the artist is a messenger between them and the audience?

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Can ceramics be a form of self-care? Sitting in a cozy space, slowly covering blank clay with color can have a profoundly calming effect. Rotating a textured mug in your hand to spread paint across a template or letting your imagination reveal a picture on the surface of a plate is important in what it's not: idly scrolling a screen or absorbing a chaotic assault of algorithm-indebted ads and announcements. As digital busyness invades every minute of our waking lives, hand-painting ceramics is a mental and emotional cleanse.

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To live in Saigon is to coexist with clutter. Chaos is perhaps to be expected, when one’s habitat is a gargantuan crowded compressed narrow concretized megalopolis of over 10 million people, but few cities I’ve been to are as cluttered as Saigon.

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Đăk Đrinh Lake lies in the northern reaches of Kon Tum, where the hills rise in slow, deliberate waves and the pace of life is set by the land. The Ca Dong ethnic communities remain here, maintaining their language, stilt houses, and routines that have shaped this corner of the highlands for generations.

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Growing up in America, Christmas meant arriving at my grandmother's house and immediately devouring a handmade gingerbread cookie drenched in sugar; driving with my Dad to “candy cane lane,” where homeowners took particular pride in stringing colorful lights on their gutters, windows and frontyard pines; and sneaking to our living room’s Christmas tree at 5am to sit in the dark staring at the presents, waiting until my mom said we were allowed to wake up and open them. Christmas began when Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas songs played on the long ride home from Thanksgiving with relatives and continued through snowy Christmas tree lots, studies paused for classroom parties with pizza and soda pop, and the 1966 Grinch cartoon played on repeat.

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Between the pulse of Trần Phú and the hush of the ocean lies a place where the sea begins to feel like home.

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Between mountains and sea in Ninh Thuận, a few quiet days at Amanoi became something more enduring than a luxury escape. It became a reflection on transition, attention and the rare calm that remains long after the journey ends.

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Even though Christmas is arguably the most important holiday of the year in the west, it is not a traditional special occasion in Vietnam, at least not in the same way Vietnamese go gaga over Tết.

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Hội An, one of Vietnam’s top domestic and international tourist destinations, is in danger of developing a negative reputation.

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If one were to strike out west from Hanoi and follow the Red River for some 50 kilometers, there they will find Đường Lâm Village — a quintessence of rural Vietnam.

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There was a game I used to play with my dad whenever we would stop at a traffic light. He would point to a random license plate in front of us and quiz me on where it came from.

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Travel site Booking.com dubbed Mũi Né “one of 2026’s trending travel spots,” reflective of the international attention and domestic emphasis the beach city is currently receiving.

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From loudspeakers broadcasting construction anthems during wartime to melancholic ballads mourning vanished street corners, Hanoi's soundtrack reveals a city that has never quite learned to live in its present tense.

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A single color has no intrinsic meaning, but rather contains and reflects the many emotions, memories, and experiences an individual associates with it. Red, for example, means something different to everyone, particularly those who look deeply and with great intention.

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What does luxury travel mean? The center of countless hospitality conference panels, LinkedIn posts, and marketing pitch decks, this question will elicit different answers depending on who is asked. Exclusivity, indulgent comforts, unique experiences, and dedicated service surely play a part, but a visit to Banyan Tree Lăng Cô, recent recipient of Two Michelin Keys,  reveals that no matter one’s definition, true luxury travel requires an emotional connection.

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Can a painting reflect who we are, even if we can’t see ourselves thoroughly? And how does faith guide us forward in life?

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I recently took a trip to Vũng Tàu after a long summer of cultural research, which had me traveling up and down Vietnam. It had been seven years since I’d been back to the homeland, and 19 since I’d last seen the beaches of Vũng Tàu, when I was only 16. It felt like returning to a high school crush, and it made me think of the words of Trần Thiện Thanh, who once wrote, “Nhớ lúc xa xưa mười sáu trăng tròn…” I won’t say I wasn’t looking for something familiar, poetic, and possibly even as sappy.

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There is a certain timelessness to the song ‘Người Tình Mùa Đông’ by Như Quỳnh, especially in the visuals of its very first performance. For generations of Vietnamese listeners, ‘Người Tình Mùa Đông’ is an icon in the hall of fame of Vietnamese music, but as I have come to discover, the melody that Vietnamese know as ‘Người Tình Mùa Đông’ has lived a life much richer and more transcendent than it might appear.

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The several dozen family altars that formed a hodgepodge pile had each been abandoned in graveyards. For many, this would make them extremely inauspicious. But to artist Nguyễn Quốc Dân, they are perfect for making art.

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When you decide to start a family, the choice touches every corner of life. Priorities shift, responsibilities grow, sacrifices are made, and days begin to orbit around the children. Vacations change too, with self-indulgence and beach naps giving way to keeping children engaged and content. But not everything has to be a compromise, especially if you know where to go.

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Deep beneath the ocean surface, colorful ceramic fragments have been scattered and stacked upon one another for centuries. Some remain whole, others broken, many still covered with corals and ocean dust. Once precious commodities, these pieces have become time capsules, carried into the Vietnamese waters by ships that never reached their destinations. What stories might these centuries-old ceramic artifacts hold about Vietnam’s connection with surrounding kingdoms?

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If given the opportunity, what would each of Vietnam's provinces select as a mascot?

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Cellophane lanterns, the nostalgic anchors of our past full-moon festivals, are still alive thanks to the nimble fingers of craftspeople at the Phú Bình lantern “village” in Saigon.

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Fragments of history, whether through imagery or text, often feel distant in time, yet so familiar when encountered visually. Combat sketches, postage stamps, and typography from propaganda posters invite viewers to ask: how do they speak to today’s generation, living half a century after the war, and what do they reveal about our collective memory of Vietnam today?

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There’s a particular sequence of sounds that many, if not all, of us would remember by heart: two rings of the phone, a high-pitched female voice saying “Can I help you?”, some dog barks, and then “Ai ai ai, I’m your little butterfly.”

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When preparing to visit Hội An’s Thanh Hà Pottery Museum, I didn’t anticipate an opportunity to reminisce. I hadn’t been to the museum dedicated to the region’s pottery traditions before, so how could it illicit fond memories?

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When does a piece of functional design become art and vice versa? Gazing long enough at a hook on the wall, noticing its graceful curves, bright colors, and simple flourishes in shape, will have you unsure where the border between the two lies, or if there even is one.

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Darkness fills the space and a flame fiercely burns on the large screen, while dim lights and floating fabric linger behind. Ngô Đình Bảo Châu transforms domestic and bodily forms into works that explore the interconnectedness between the human body and the surrounding environment within this evolving world — in between destruction and rebirth.

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Traveling south through central Vietnam by train can bring you to the familiar or the obscure: the Disney-fication of Hội An, the peaceful bays of Quy Nhơn, or the thrill of derelict spaces in Huế.

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What are our memories made of?

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Under the shared heartbeat of “129BPM,” the dancers channeled their emotions through movement, navigating between individuality and collectivity both on and off stage. Extending beyond Vietnamese audiences, the piece has now been presented on an international platform at George Town Festival 2025 in Penang, Malaysia, marking a significant milestone for Vietnamese contemporary hip-hop performance on the international stage.

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A soft breeze skims across the calm waves and golden sand while you soak up summer sunlight with hardly another soul in sight. A private beach with plenty of space to stretch out alongside loved ones represents the ideal vacation destination for many. Angsana Lăng Cô takes beach resorts in Vietnam to another level with its surprisingly affordable opportunities to savor Central Vietnam’s longest private beach in comfort.

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Signs are like voices.

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We began our journey in front of a bank where the street Trần Nhật Duật turned into Chợ Gạo.

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How did Vietnamese artists navigate the complex tides of social and political changes, and mark their own position in the art world as the “Others” during interwar Paris — which was celebrated as the “City of Lights,” yet also a stage for both colonial propaganda and a ground for anti-colonial resistance?

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We often encounter adventure tales in books and through adaptations of films or television. But what if a newly imagined adventure tale can also be written as an exhibition — one that maps strange-yet-familiar landscapes with a colonial history of exploration and exploitation?

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After two successful nights in Saigon last year, a mesmerizing contemporary hip-hop dance performance is bringing its raw energy abroad.

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Hidden within the compound of the Saigon St. Joseph’s Seminary is a historic chapel that has withstood the test of time.

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To Đặng Thái Tuấn, the talent behind illustration project “Vietnam Retropunk,” whimsical depictions of robots and animatronics sprouting out from everyday objects and activities embody the space in between the ancient and the futuristic.

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A 3,000-kilometer coastline is one of nature’s best gifts to Vietnam, bringing about not just ample seafood, but also a motherlode of sea salt.

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Being born at the cusp of the Year of the Rabbit (cat) and the Year of the Tiger offers the literal meaning for Hoàng Phúc's artist name, thố đầu • hổ vĩ, but he hopes it carries a metaphorical one, as well: “a humble beginning but a positive end,” he explained to Saigoneer. thố đầu • hổ vĩ’s origins may be humble — he started seriously focusing on illustrations just four years ago when he started university — but he has already reached remarkable achievements, as evidenced by three projects he shared with us.

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Summer travelers are invited to step into barefoot elegance on Phú Quốc’s storied shores.

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As tourists, it's in our built-in compass to seek out novelties and excitements, if anything, to remind us that our daily humdrum is not everything, and there exists a world out there with multitudes to explore.

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I was maybe seven when I first clasped my hands and whispered a plea to Ông Địa.

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After someone or something reaches the end of their days, which aspects of their existence in the minds of those who remain would be the first to succumb to the erosive brush of time? Is it sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound?

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On my last full day in Khon Kaen, Thailand, I was on a mission to catch the sunset, although the cloudy and gloomy sky didn’t give me much hope. Instead, I randomly stumbled upon a gate with signs written in Vietnamese. Out of curiosity, I decided to walk in, and the farther I walked, the more clearly I spotted a familiar image from afar: a one-pillar pagoda standing right on the edge of the reservoir.

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Every sip of lotus tea encapsulates all the essences of the natural landscapes of Tây Hồ.

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