When Hoang came over to see the room, he spoke about a Footscray art project he’d organised the year before. The project didn’t take place in a gallery or have a title, and now that he thought of it, didn’t really have an artist. He said it involved lots of people, almost 2000. It was a ‘community event’, he said, although the community didn’t know this. Hoang raised a hand to make scratch marks in the air but then awkwardly brought it down again as if this gesture, or perhaps the ease of this gesture, was also part of the problem.

Hoang said there were only a couple of people who knew about the project. I was the third. Everything he said about the project was pretty vague and nondescript (even for Hoang, who was once credited as ‘the quiet guy’ in a friend’s program notes). Conversations like these were more about getting a sense of the other person, and Hoang already knew I wanted him to move in. We’d met six months earlier at his first exhibition in the Little Saigon shopping centre, and even then I sensed his caution about where discourse might take the emerging artist. He told me about how the previous year while living alone above a chemist in Kensington he’d looked up every Vietnamese surname in the phonebook with a Footscray postcode, copying out each name and address onto a stamped envelope as he went.