©Danae Beyond Digital Art
Richard STREITMATTER-TRAN (born in 1972 in Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He earned his Bachelor's degree from the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He has been an art correspondent for the Madrid-based magazine Art.Es and an editor in Ho Chi Minh City for Contemporary. In 2005, he received the Martell Contemporary Asian Art research grant from the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong for his one-year research project, Mediating the Mekong. He served as a teaching assistant at Harvard University (2000-2004), conducted media arts research at the MIT Media Lab (2000), and was a guest lecturer at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2003-2004. He was a curatorial program advisor for Para/Site in Hong Kong and a mentor for the San Art Artist Residency program in Ho Chi Minh City. From 2006 to 2015, he was a senior lecturer at RMIT International University Vietnam. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in applied arts at Ton Duc University and is a lecturer at the Faculty of Design and Art at Hoa Sen University in HCMC.
When he moved to Vietnam in 2003, he formed ProjectOne, a now-defunct performance art group based in Ho Chi Minh City. Two years later, he became a founding member of Mogas Station, a group of international creators (artists and architects) based in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2010, he founded DIA PROJECTS, a contemporary art experiment and workspace in Ho Chi Minh City. Working with his collaborator Le Tuong Vi under the name VILE/RATS, they develop projects emerging from artistic research and speculative investigations at the intersections of science, philosophy, and art. Other projects have been realized in collaboration with CIANT (Prague), The Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), The Japan Foundation, and The Japan Society. Since its inception, Dia Projects has hosted four researchers-in-residence from Bangkok, Manila, Montreal, and Seoul. In 2015, with Tran Thanh Ha, Dia Projects inaugurated a new exhibition space in Ho Chi Minh City.