The Russi Hive
The Russi Hive is a podcast about creativity—unfolding in conversations with expected and unexpected people; not only artists, but anyone with a practice, a system, or an obsession that shapes how they think and live.
Presented by Ricco/Maresca and hosted by Alejandra Russi, The Russi Hive is filmed and recorded in the gallery’s New York City space. This show is a place for those drawn to the unseen mechanics of making, the inner weather reports, invented languages, and the way an idea arrives at the "wrong" time and still changes everything.
The Russi Hive
Phong Bui: Culture-Maker — The Brooklyn Rail, Social Energy, and Slowness of Culture
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Phong Bui has spent decades turning culture into a social act—bringing artists, writers, thinkers, and people from very different worlds into the same conversation. In this episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra talks with Bui about the life and philosophy behind The Brooklyn Rail, which he describes as a living organism: something to be nurtured, protected, kept free, and never allowed to harden into bureaucracy.
The interview moves from Bui’s childhood in Vietnam and his arrival in the United States as a refugee in 1980 to the artistic and intellectual communities that shaped him in New York. He reflects on adaptation, collaboration, publishing, mentorship, and the social energy that turns culture into something lived rather than merely consumed.
What Bui keeps returning to is slowness: the time it takes to make a painting, write a poem, build trust, or sustain a community. Against speed, anxiety, and algorithmic predictability, he argues for unpredictability as a condition of freedom—and for culture that stays alive by refusing to be packaged too neatly.
Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.
Sound design: Federico Casazza.
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I'm Alejandra Russi, and this is the Russi Hive. Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice. Today, I sit down with Phong Bui, artist, writer, curator, publisher, and artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail to talk about culture as something you don't just cover but actively make. From Vietnam to Brooklyn, from Buddhist temples to subway broadsheets, we trace translation, adaptation, and countering speed and chaos with warmth, slowness, and a publication that will always be free. This podcast is presented by Ricco/ Maresca. Thank you for joining me, Phong Bui, and welcome to the Russi Hive Podcast. I am thrilled to have you here on a Monday morning. Most people prefer to shoot these interviews later in the day, which is fine, but I am so totally a morning person, so this is my time. I have a feeling though that if we were doing this at midnight, you would be totally fine with that, also, though.
Speaker 3Anytime is good for me.
SpeakerAnytime is good for you. So are you ready for your hive card?
Speaker 3I hope so.
SpeakerHere it comes. Five Vietnamese style proverbs for Phong Bui: New language, same heart. Walk slowly, hear more. Same rhythm, different forms. Small table, big ideas, plant the rail, trust the bloom.
Speaker 3Cool.
SpeakerSo for your hive card, I was inspired by a proverb that you've quoted from your grandmother. Uh, if you live in a long tube, be thin. If you live in a barrel, be round. In other words, the ability to be adaptable without losing your core, which is something that all of us who were born elsewhere obviously develop.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerBut on a philosophical level, it speaks of identity as an ongoing narrative that is flexible in the details, but remains recognizable in the voice that is telling the story. Or in Les words, the narrator can survive a lot of plot twists. Yeah. Let me start by saying that what I admire the most about you, and I admire a lot of things about you, is that you don't just comment on culture, you create it, you produce it, uh, you generate conditions, you make rooms, you create the atmosphere where artists, writers, thinkers, and people from totally different worlds start speaking to each other like they're on the same sentence. Um, so today I want to talk about creativity as social energy, how art and conversation don't just reflect consciousness, they shape it, and how collaboration isn't a buzzword, it's a medium. Um, and obviously, we will circle back to the theme of displacement and adaptation, because in your life, translation isn't just a footnote, it seems to be the main method. Uh, changing shape, staying open, turning movement into a kind of intelligence. So before we talk about everything you have built in New York, I want to go back to the place that first shaped you. So you were born in Huey, Vietnam. When you hear that word, what memory hits first?
Speaker 3Going to Buddhist temple with my grandmother every Saturday, sometimes Sunday too, sometimes even during the week. The most memorable of all what I remember being joyful was time spent with my grandmother. This is my paternal grandmother, who I admire great deal. Because she too, in her life, suffered a great deal, having come from a lesser family, then married to my grandfather, whose parents did not treat her properly, perhaps even abusively. But she endured the suffering and and you know, brought up a quite amazing family. But she once told me when I was ten years old when you grow up, grandson, you will suffer just like anyone else is in this fate of the earth. And don't ever complain that your suffering is more unique than theirs, but you've suffered the right way. And that stay with me forever. So the way is identical to grandma.
SpeakerOh wow.
Speaker 3Buddhist temple is the background.
SpeakerYes. And that's the that's the image that comes about.
Speaker 3Yes, it's it's an image.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerWhat other parts of that early world still sneak into your thinking today on a regular day in Brooklyn?
Speaker 3Well, I mean, you just don't know the unpredictability of life. You know, accident does happen, illness occurs, all of those things you can't control. Not that I'm interested in control too many things, because I think controlling can be very discouraging, you know. But there's a structure that you create. You want us to protect it, you want to nurture it. For example, the Brooklyn Rail is a living organism. You have to nurture it. You have to protect it. Uh why not ever let it become bureaucratic? It's very important that it won't ever become such a bureaucratic machine. It must stay truthful to human spirit and its creative energy and impulses and let it be imperfect from here and onward.
SpeakerYes.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's very important.
SpeakerAn ongoing living organism that evolves and changes and hopefully it has its own recorrected mechanism, like liberal democracy itself. So, how did you leave Vietnam? I have heard the phrase boat people attached to your story, but that just seems to collapse everything into a label. So I would love to hear it in your own words.
Speaker 3Well, the other word is refugee. That applied to the rest of those who have a desperate need to leave or flee their respective countries. But both people was another easy label that identified, I guess, to meet two late 70s when ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese who have lived in Vietnam long enough, and when they were being marginalized and asked to leave Vietnam. And that's when my mother, who had worked with some of her ethnic Chinese colleagues, managed to arrange for us to escape. We already in the labor camp in Delta area since 1977.
SpeakerHow old were you then?
Speaker 3Oh, barely 12 years old, or 11. Um yeah, we were there for three and a half years.
Speaker 1Wow.
Speaker 3It was not as severely surveillance. So that's how my mother managed to go back and forth between Gaibe, where we were, to the tail end of Vietnam, a town called um Bungbe, I think. And that's when um she managed to change the identity to ethnic Chinese, to local policemen where they would take money and allow you to have a new ID and undertake the on the boat, but there's no guarantee once you're on the sea. If you get caught by the Coast Guard, it would be very, very um, you know, determinant of imprisonment and other f form of punishment would be hover over the horizon. But luckily we we managed to get to Malaysia after a good week on the sea.
SpeakerAnd then eventually you landed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3Oh, it's so horrible. It's the worst township. It's called Ben Salem.
SpeakerUh-huh.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's so ugly.
SpeakerIt is.
Speaker 3Oh God. I I forgive me for those who live there. It listened to me. I don't mean that. It's just that uh, well, let's put it this way. I remember when my aunt and and uncle brought over television that asked us to watch television day and night.
SpeakerTo learn, yeah.
Speaker 3To learn American culture too. We already have a taste of it. By the time I grew growing up, American pop culture was very pervasive. So, of course, I had aunt and uncle who'd been in America, so they would send records and other things home. So I grew up with a little, you know, knowledge of American culture. I love Delta Blues, for example. I've grown up listening to people like Robert Johnson and Murdy Waters and even earlier Delta Blues master, people like Bucker White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others. Um I do have a good knowledge of America somehow. But the first film that we watched one night was Deliverance.
Speaker 1Uh-huh. Yeah.
Speaker 3The only film, well, it's adapted from a novel, the only novel that James Dickey had written, the great poet, who worked for some PR company promoting Coca-Cola and Leigh's potato chip in Atlanta. I think it might have been in 1991. He came to my class, or Philadelphia gave a reading. He was a good friend of my poetry professor named Stephen Burg, who founded the American Poetry Review. And I only then later in life discover it's the same writer, novelist, a poet who wrote the only novel. And he was famously once say that I sell my soul to the devil during the day, but I buy it back at night.
SpeakerSo other than kind of the visual shock of America being so different, was there anything else that surprised you from being here and seeing it up close?
Speaker 3I mean, the idea of suburb was so strange. That's where we were. Not a prosperous and you know, well-to-do suburb. This is more impoverished suburb. But the idea of suburb itself is odd.
SpeakerVery American idea.
Speaker 3It was created in um 1947, in the fall 1977, maybe in November. I can't remember the exact month. But it was created by um John and Abraham Levit. You heard of Levittown?
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Well, that's how it was built. Actually, Long Island used to be filled with potato farms, and that's how they created the first suburb there. It's called the Levittown.
Speaker 1Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3The idea is to build a large community with identical housing units in order to return GI from the war so they can build their home, their families.
SpeakerMake a family.
Speaker 3And nobody can complain because all one house is identical to the next. It's as if whatever failed in utopianist idea in the Soviet Union got planted here in the US. So I was shocked. I was perplexed, and I noticed right away that condition, that creation, you know?
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3And it's uh it's serious conformity involved in that perception, control perception.
SpeakerYeah. In a city, you you know, you can blend into a crowd. There's a lot of noise, there's a lot happening. But in Bucks County, I imagine it was exactly the opposite. How did you experience adaptation in that context?
Speaker 3Well, it wasn't easy. The first couple of years, um obviously the very few small population of immigrants. There was some African American, some Asian, mostly Korean and some Chinese, some Indian, but very small. And I think our family is the only Vietnamese family in that mix. So I experienced aggressive racism occasionally. I was very angry. I got in too many fights. Um luckily I was a pretty good fighter. I lost all that ability now. Know what happened. But um I managed to push back and resist.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3And not allow those bully to, you know, undermine not just me, other um immigrants and people in the school that I remember. So I got into a lot of trouble.
SpeakerIn that early era, was there a secret inner life that you protected?
Speaker 3Well, I mean, it was hard to know because, you know, we barely got to America. Uh, the first thing came to mind to all of us was surviving the beginning of what it meant to rebuild the whole life. I think most immigrants, when they come to America, I think they all come with two reasons. One is freedom, and the other is opportunity to to recreate their lives. And I think um you have to give incredible profound acknowledgement to those that come because they really come knowing that their lives will be filled with sacrifice for their children. They might not be enjoying the prospect of becoming American, but they would do anything they could possibly to elevate and allow the opportunity for their children to be to become American. Do you know?
SpeakerYes.
Speaker 3The idea to become American still very much a condition that I think most people are very attracted to. I mean, it's even now. Well, even now, with the disastrous uh political condition that we are sustaining, surviving through, I think it's fairly true to say that in every embassy across the world, um, the line to get visa to come here is still long.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3Maybe it's not as long as it used to be.
SpeakerIt's harder to get the visa. It's harder to get a visa. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerSo you've talked about trying to speak perfect English at first. When did you feel like you could relax into your own voice, accent included, and what changed when you did?
Speaker 3We didn't Jonas Macas. I met him in the late 90s, but we became really good friends around 2001-2002, leading to 2003 when he probably moved from Broadway, his huge lot there, to Green Point, which is my neighborhood, where we would spend a lot of time together. I would see Jonas at least twice a week. He had such a thick accent, and I realized when he first came, he worked very hard to have a very proper speaking English. You can detect that in his early films. But as you grow older, I think the accent comes very naturally and prominently. And so uh listen to him talk in the way he did make me very relaxed about my own accent. So embrace my own accent has been a condition that I have accepted ever since.
SpeakerYes.
Speaker 3Yeah, I never try to speak with perfect English any longer.
SpeakerI can't imagine you without your it's part of your being. I mean, it's part of your being Fong. It's too late now. No. Okay, so at some point you go from Fong trying to find his footing between worlds to Fong, the culture engineer extraordinaire that you are. Uh what happened in the middle?
Speaker 3I went to school to study illustration, graphic design, and everything in between printmaking, topography, photography, so that I would be well trained, equipped to be an art director one day for Governage. But you know, I had a wonderful professor, a wonderful painter named Jane Piper, who, at the first class, painting 101 in freshman year, she liked what I was doing. I was having a great time making painting from life. She would set up a steel light ala Matisse. She loved Matisse. I was so thrilled to have learned from Jane what painting was about. But I remember the tail end of the class, she said to me, You seem a very driven young man with lofty ambition, and I'm sure you will achieve your goal, but you have a soul of an artist. If you ever change your mind, you let me know.
Speaker 1Huh.
Speaker 3And you know, I didn't think of it at all. Because I when I graduated, I won the first prize in senior thesis, so job opportunity was fairly open where I was at the time, the summer leading to having graduated in 1985. I think I was very excited, the idea of coming to New York for this interview. I already done my interview with Homark, with Shemayev and Gasmore. Interestingly, later, soon later in that year or so, I became friend with the Chemayev family, Ivan and his family, because his daughter, Sasha Chamayev, was in literally in the same studio adjacent to my at the New York Studio School. Anyway, to make the long story short, I came to New York, and literally, between three hours or so, after having an interview with Chamayev Gasmore and Homar, the next one was Caldenash. I need to kill the time in between. So that three hours was spent at the Modern Museum, you know? And prior to that very moment, I have been in museum, but mostly with my classmates, it's always a class trip to National Museum of Art, to Modern Museum, or the Guggeneye, the Whitney, no, even the PMA, very often called a museum of art. I've never been alone. Look at painting. So in that instant, three hours looking at paintings of works of art at MoMA was a serious epiphany. What changed my life was looking at Matisse's piano lessons slowly, the rest studio slowly, you know, Picasso Channel House. I remember looking at Pollock 2, Seawolf, but it was the Coonin, Woman One, that really, real, really changed me. I remember having Goosebum. And having read already Joyce artists, put it with artists as a young man and beginning to read Julius. Joyce talk about uh everyday epiphany. It's not religious, not insignificant. It's just everyday holiness and joy itself. Intense, intense joy. Everybody has encountered it. But sometimes we just let it slide through, you know, we don't take it seriously. But it can change you. And that instant changed me. I was reminded what Jane Piper had said to me. And you change your mind, you let me know. So I rushed to the cafeteria, asked for five dollars worth of quarters. I remember in those days, you know, you can make a phone call in a phone booth. And luckily Jane was there, so she picked up the phone, and I told her that I now want to become an artist. I'm no longer interested in pursuing my life as an art director for Camden Nash.
Speaker 1Wow.
Speaker 3She was very happy. She said, Well, I will call my best friend, Mercedes Matter, the founder of New York Studio School, on A Street, which is used to be the first Whitney Museum. It just turned out that Mercedes' father, this American modernist, a painter named Arthur B. Carr, was someone Jane had been working as an assistant forever. So that's how I got sent to New York Student School, where I spent a year studying. Under wonderful painter named Nicholas Garone, or Garonne. I studied with also Peter Agostini, wonderful sculpture, Signy guys, who occasionally would come and critique wonderful author of the first monograph, critical monograph on Brancuzi. And the whole studio school series of lecture was wonderful. It's legendary. And it was there that I was asked to come to the home of Meyer and Lillian Shapiro to fetch a work of art of his for a group show the following year in the fall of, I think, maybe the summer 1986. And that's how it all changed. Meeting mind Lillian. I remember I was told more likely Lillian will be the door, given already wrapped painting. And I should just thank her and on my way because she's super protective of Maya's time and privacy. But you know, it was Maya who appeared the door. And he would ask me about my background, where I came from, and he immediately said, Oh, the dead offensive was the most atrocious act that Americans had committed. And then he went on to offer his perception of the whole entire Vietnam War and in view with the civil rights movement struggle and whatnot. And then naming all the famous, you know, officials from the North and the South, before you know it, they invited me to their home for tea. It was a long, two hours long to um visit. And I came away with either or Sharon Kierkegaard was to return in two weeks' time.
SpeakerAnd that's having read them.
Speaker 3Oh it was not an easy task.
SpeakerTwo weeks is not that long.
Speaker 3No, but and then it it it turned into this weekly visit, a ritual.
SpeakerOh, that's wonderful.
Speaker 3Yeah. So every time I come, he would test me, and then when I come away, it would be a new book. So it should be a weekly reading of every book. And um that's how I have amassed my reading discipline. Um I I never thought it would be a need to go to graduate school or PhD. Because I did want to become an art historian, but he told me that uh that I have a good mind, but no more I did not possess a natural monastic temperament. So therefore, I would never be succeeding as a great scholar. I'm too social.
SpeakerVery interesting. Thank you. Thank you, Vira. Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, he did see that.
Speaker 3He saw that in me.
SpeakerSo the Brooklyn Rail started in the late 90s as a weekly Cerox broadsheet, folded in half, four columns, meant to be read on the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Take me to the moment when you come into this picture, and how did you transform it into a real printed journal?
Speaker 3I think it started a week, just before I met these four founding editors when it was a pamphlet. It was a bi-weekly pamphlet. I think we printed 500 copies. 8x11, you fold it in half. They have appeared four columns.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 3And that four columns would consist of art criticism, original poetry, a film review, book review, sometime fiction. It would rotate. Occasionally in the weekend, we used to meet up Friday night, certainly Saturday night for sure, at the Brooklyn Alehouse. You would hear people telling you what they read. Sometimes there's certain things they really liked, some they find it completely disagreeable. So criticism builds up as a natural occurrence, you know. I would get very frustrated, argue with my friends, because they seem to be very fixated, committed to their own respective specialized fields of interest. For someone who's committed in the in the film community or film discipline, hardly pay any attention to poetry and vice versa. I'm a typical generalist. I read a lot of things, I have broader interests. So I want not to a boring person at dinner table. That was very important in my upbringing, you know. You you should expand your knowledge and interest in different things. So I would argue with my friends passionately, sometimes very with great frustration. And I was reminded by this wonderful Vietnamese proverb. It says, when you argue with intelligent people, you can't win. But when you argue with stupid people, you can't stop. So I thought it was natural to create a paper that would allow these friends to express publish their expertise. And over time, it will spill over. I call it spill over readership. So yeah, it was in the summer 2000, I saw a painting with a bit of money. And I thought if I were to commit my life to do this, I may as well invent and create a newspaper, physical paper. And that's when I started. And the first issue was October 2000. And the first two years was hard to you know to inspire people to write for the rail.
SpeakerDid it was it this format from the very beginning?
Speaker 3Yeah, it's a little bit longer.
SpeakerIt was longer.
Speaker 3Yeah, a little bit longer. And we chop it off eventually by maybe 2004, so it can fit in the racks better.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 3Yeah, the the longer version seemed to spill over the edge a little bit. It looks as though it looks as though.
SpeakerA little droopy and droopy.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerSo New York used to be a city of free papers. You would grab Time Out, Metro, Village Boys be on your way to the subway. And then in the space of just a few years, all of them ended their print editions. The rail has stayed alive and free the whole time. Practically speaking, how have you kept it alive? Like what's the real fuel behind it?
Speaker 3Well, I think when you're writing online for online publication, it's a different commitment, different expectation. You can still add it and change the things, you know? But when you expect to have a deadline, the print issue is permanent. So the attitude is so different, far different than the one you write for or online, you know. We I experience all the time. I also find it extremely frustrating for people who write for web publication, and when it dies, the archive is no longer intact. It disappears with it. So I'm somebody who cares about archives, physical thing, that consider to be the testament, a proof of that person's commitment in his, her, or their work. It's a proof of their lifelong labor of love. So I collect ephemeras, printed meadows. As long as you remember, even in college, when I first came to America, I would collect a lot of different interesting pamphlets and magazines. Obviously the most important one, when I was teaching at Haverford College for that one year in 1999, I went to a a Yorksell nearby. And the Yorksell was fantastic. It must have been a professor, your sale, you know, or somebody who's very educated. I bought the whole entirety, which is 10 issue of the Seven Arts magazine. Super cool.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Yeah, it lasted one year from 1916 to 1917.
SpeakerThat's amazing, wow.
Speaker 3Yeah. Um the premise was to cross-pollinate the arts. Architecture, art painting, dance, you know.
SpeakerWhich is exactly what you do in the rail. So speaking of the rail as a living organism, if we think of it that way, what part of it are you? Are you the nervous system, the circulatory system, the immune system, and what parts of it have grown beyond you?
Speaker 3Well, I'm a good midwife. That's who I am. When a baby is born, the baby doesn't need a violent pull pull. Baby ass for a gentle push. And I think that's what I want. I have been doing that, I think. A nurturing midwife.
SpeakerAnd nowadays, what does the rail want the reader to feel on that now metaphorical train ride?
Speaker 3I mean, the torture of sustaining the rail while keeping it free has been the greatest joy, but also the greatest difficulty. Because I don't want to have a mission statement and I know that I suffer for it. Because sometimes people who want to support you they want to know with great certainty why they're supporting for what particular reason.
SpeakerWhat it's about.
Speaker 3Yes.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3What is it about?
SpeakerWhat is this about?
Speaker 3I don't know.
SpeakerRight.
Speaker 3I mean, I think finally I have to surrender somewhat by saying the rail is nothing more, nothing less, than a mere reflection of the artist's difficult journey. That's maybe the definition of the rail. And um who reads the rail is free. So those that read, it all matters. I have no control of it, nor I want to.
SpeakerRight.
Speaker 3Let it be.
SpeakerLet it be. So in 2020, you launched the new social environment, which was a daily series of online conversations where people could think and be together while the world was falling apart, essentially. And then shortly after you started the Singing in Unison project, uh, which took the same energy, I think, um, and put it back into the physical space with a series of crazy, multifaceted, amazing exhibitions, one of which took place here at Rico Maresca. In that moment of the pandemic, what felt most broken to you?
Speaker 3I mean, the day that President Trump came on television in the afternoon, Monday, March 16, 2020, and he deployed the term social distancing and demanded the mandate of 15-day quarantine. The Rail had just done a collateral project in Venice at the Venice Biennale. We just came back in February. And I remember thinking to myself, I wonder if Donald J. Trump was aware of the term quarantine. You know? Because every boat that arrived to the port of Venice was asked 15 days before they were saved, so they don't bring disease to the city.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3It was horrifying to the idea in addition to deploying the term social distancing. I I realized very fast, as soon as that happened, that we were in trouble. The velocity of speed, the ability to create generous chaos and anxiety of all of among people was something that we have observed in the past. The tyrant, the autocrat, they have done similar things. You know? So of course, speed, what is what brought Trump to his presidency, to Twitter, to social media. You can argue the same about Obama previously with Google. It's a bit different, but nevertheless, the same idea of how to deploy speed to elevate your importance. You know? And I realized we have to do everything possible to counter speed. That means we have to generate what we love, which is slowness of culture. It takes time to write a poem. It takes time to make a painting. It takes time to chorograph a dance, compose a piece of music. So we must bring the community of among our creatives together, and every day we elevate and share what they love doing in their own creative fields. And that's how the social environment got started. Literally that night we met and I asked Jeremy Zillar, who was just joined the board at the Rail, who have worked for Obama Initiative. On the second term, Obama realized that he needed to hire and recruit people like Jeremy, who can come in and teach the governmental worker to be sped up with technology. So he had worked for Obama. At the arrival of the president, he left. So he joined our board. So he was able to help us to create the Zoom. Because we're already using it during the course of our collateral project where I would ask half of my team, stay back in Brooklyn, oversee the monthly publication. The other half would be in Venice.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3To organize all the public programmings, whether film screening, whether poetry reading, musical performances, panel discussion. It's not just a show. We organize all the discipline that appear in the rail. So that's why our cultural project is so unique. So it was natural to do so with the social environment before you know it. It brought so many friends together, people we admire together. I mean, not every day you can interview Peter Brooke, who came the last minute and share with us from his home in Paris about his last play that he was working on. Not every day you get Wayne Thibault, the age of 100, tuning in to share what he's doing in his latest exhibition from San Francisco. So I knew as long we can inject warmth in the coin of technology, we'll be okay. We will succeed our intention because everything about technology has always been inherent as a co-mechanism. It's our counterfriction to bring warmth to it, to counter it its speed by slowness culture, but we have to be equally aggressive, and that's why we wanted to do it every day. Do you know the real readership then was maybe 800,000? So the social environment on our Zoom platform were able to connect so many friends over the world. It's not just in the US, it's from Vietnam, from India, from China, from Latin American countries, you know. So I don't know. With the new website, we're now reaching nearly four million.
SpeakerSo it's really And your website is looking amazing, by the way. It's not even done. It's looking great.
Speaker 3Thank you.
SpeakerYeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, the the social environments were incredible that you managed to put one of these every single day. I mean, that is not a small thing.
Speaker 3Well, you have to be agile. Um say the least. You had to be agile, you had to be sensitive to the the condition of urgency. And um it's important not to think about things. You're very important that you surrender to the win.
SpeakerI totally agree with that.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerYou just have to do.
Speaker 3Yeah, you don't think about it.
SpeakerDon't think about it. And also it forces you to kind of look at your real network, at your real, like the people that you know, the people that you can connect. It's you know, when you need to do something, you connect the dots, I feel.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerYou know. Absolutely.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, the the whole idea is to amplify warmth, amplify slowness of culture, um, and be fearless because you have to match the energy of those who wish to destroy culture.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3And you have to match that energy. A lot of ambitious tyrants or autocrats, they have that energy. You have to match it.
Speaker 1You have to, yes.
Speaker 3You have, and you do it without guns and violence. You do it with the love of culture. Because free thinkers like us is a threat to all autocrats. They are fearful of what we do. You know why? Because what in what we do, we are the masters of our destinies. In fact, Timothy Snyder says something very profound. You know? He says free people are those people who are very predictable to themselves, but unpredictable to those who want to conform them. But unfree people, those people who are unpredictable to themselves, and yet so predictable to tyrants.
Speaker 1Absolutely.
Speaker 3Yeah, to those who want to control over their lives. So at the core of freedom is unpredictability. That's why a lot of people have a hard time counter Trump. He's so unpredictable, and they can't match that unpredictability.
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 3And us, the creative beings, must exercise that unpredictability.
SpeakerSo in your life, you curate people as carefully as you curate content. Your dinners, for example, feel like a living editorial act. Um, when you host like salon type uh gatherings like this, what are you actually trying to set emotion?
Speaker 3I mean, it should be natural. Uh people who come to my home for those wonderful dinners, they know there's no agenda. It's important. Most most of us sometimes we go to dinner. There's a social agenda. You know? Like an after dinner, an opening reception of so-and-so exhibition, or for what I do, it just introducing people who might have not met before, or if they have, not in the same intimate context, you know. I enjoyed that very much because it correlates what appeared in the rail. I thought to myself, can I recreate that environment, that community for my generation?
SpeakerSo your energy around people is high voltage fong. And I'm wondering what is the private counter rhythm that makes that possible? Do you have any daily rituals that protect it?
Speaker 3Yeah, I make my meditation ruins, I make my meditation paintings, with recently, happily so, that I met the great jazz composer named Hayes Greenfield through Harry Cooper, the phenomenal curator at the night. National Museum, the NGA Gallery of Art. He's a student of Hayes, and I learned that other people have been students of Hayes too, including Roy Liechtenstein. But I admire Hayes' work partly because he's been committed to bringing jazz to young children of underserved communities. And his work is terrific in that it has this encompassing totality of you know s sound immers immersity or immensity of sound that I'm interested at the moment. So he asked me to um to make an album cover for him. And I did. So I've been working with great pleasure on the series, and it launched a new new way of meditating for me. So when I make the meditation painting, I would put on his music to listen to. And um I have the feeling I'm gonna do that for quite a long while. Yeah, so it's uh that's what I mean. It's like I've been doing it forever, the the notion of repeating mock making to relax myself, to meditate, to get rid of everything that is so intensely, you know, populating my mind and tasked to do. This is get rid of it all. It's like the world nirvana. It's not being there. So when you meditate, there's nothing there except the void. I feel very lucky to have met Hayes. Yeah, I think we're gonna collaborate something now. And that's what I want to do.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3My work is about collaboration.
Speaker 1Absolutely.
Speaker 3Not discrete object, you know?
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3Yeah, I hope I hope that's the case.
SpeakerSo do you feel that you've had to give anything up to lead the kind of creative life and focus that you lead?
Speaker 3I mean, you know, that's maybe long ago. You negotiate, you you premeditate, the leveraging of things that may be um considered in your own hierarchical thinking of live or creative things. But no, I gave that up. Um yeah, I gave up. Um in a way, it's really thank you, Trump, for for for his arrival with such aggression against the arts and humanities. I don't think like that anymore. No more regrets for me. I don't look back. I'm completely surrender to what Nietzsche's famous term amor fati, which means to love your faith without unconditionally, you know, you embrace life in its totality that includes everything suffering, you know, sorrow, solitude, sickness, everything. You just have to embrace everything in its totality. And I feel um for the first time very free. As free as I can feel it.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerWithin the unfolding of your fate, I suppose.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 3Yeah, very much so.
SpeakerAll right. So to wrap things up in a future-facing motion, um, you've talked about resisting the tyranny of certainty and algorithmic predictability. Whoa, that was a mouthful. Looking ahead, where do you still find pockets of real freedom in culture? Uh, places that feel genuinely alive rather than programmed.
Speaker 3Well, at the heart of freedom is unpredictability. You know, uh when I remember being a child reading about artists like Van Gogh, writers like Frank Kafka, or even further back, when you think about a great painter like Jean Vermier, you know, who was considered a minor talent. I mean, he ran an antique shop. He could only paint in the weekend. He'd make no more than one point it was 45 painting, but gradually over time, now it's only 35, they validated.
SpeakerIt's incredible.
Speaker 3Yeah. When you make small paintings like that, or small production, it's very hard to demand a grand reputation. You have to make millions, thousands of things like Waho to disseminate, you know, everything you can do with a canvas soup or Marilyn Monroe.
SpeakerRight, multiply, multiply, multiply.
Speaker 3Yes, indeed, like a supermarket, you know. That's what David used to say. But it took what 2003-something years until Thefield Torre Burger, his French poet critic, who wrote a few beautiful essays on Famia. Basically, Degas read it, give it to Monet, Monet read it, give it to Monet, Monet gave it to Fissaro. Before you know, they rushed to the Louvre to see Purmi. And it's the artists who validate the worth of Famir. And I be I still believe that today. So that's the autonomy of the committed freedom from each artist who surrender to his or her their fate, is what culture is about in the end. And I realized that culture becomes culture because of these people. You know, so you shouldn't you shouldn't package their work and spoon feed the readers or the viewers. So the rail is neither spoon feeding people nor condescending people either. It's free, it's unusual. But I remember Henry Luther III, who was a friend of mine, who actually wanted to buy the rail one day. And when I inquired further what the rail would be, it would no longer be free. It would no longer have poetry in it. It would no longer allow in the interview with artists that sometimes run from five to seven thousand words. Under Hank, we call him Hank. It'll be like 800 words or maybe 1500 words.
SpeakerYeah. That's packaged.
Speaker 3Packaged. Packaged. Yeah. Yeah. You know. I want the whole journey.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Yeah. I don't think it will work with the vision of those people who know how to spoon feed their readership, you know? I don't want that at all. I mean, you live once, you have to be mindful of your contribution. And that's it. You have one life to live. What is my contribution? So my contribution will be the rail and other things that we do. And it has to be free. I know it's not just hang, it's also sign new house. They all told me the same thing. In the America phone, when you buy something, you appreciate it. And um the rail will not survive. No more than five or six years and so on. But it's been 25 years, and I think the people is beginning people are beginning to understand our value, especially artists' foundation. Older artists' foundation tend to understand the real best. Because you take Philip Guston, you know, I mean, Musa Mayer, his daughter, is a heroic example. I mean, she not only had written a classic two-day read with pleasure, Night Studio, that was 1988, I think, published by Kanoff, she dedicated her entire life to elevate the importance of her father's work, you know. And of course, when Philip Gusden, at the expense of the infamous show at Marburgali 1970, The Winter. I mean, he didn't not no painting was sold. Terrible criticism, including the famous one from by Hürton Kramer. Even best friend, you know, like the composer Morton Felman, broke up friendship with him. Everyone was offended by this protest. Katoom like figuration, you know. He needed a job, he need to go back to teach. He went back to teach a couple days a week at Boston University and spending time with mostly poets who admire his work. You know, William Corbett, the best advocate was Bill Buxton, my friend, the late poet, and among others, Alice Knight, Clark Coolidge. So it was a poet who gave him the security, the confidence. They admired what Gurston was doing. You know, so you can imagine Musa understood that about the rail. So her and her amazing husband, Tom Mayer, they sponsor the poetry section in the rail, where the poet get paid when they get published their work. I mean, that's remarkable.
SpeakerThat is remarkable.
Speaker 3You know, so that's just one example. The same with William DeCunning Foundation, underwrite the art reviews in the rail. Helen Frankentler Foundation underwrites the lengthy artist interview. You know, Richard Pussadott Foundation supports general operation.
Speaker 1Wow.
Speaker 3Our Hale Foundation does the same, and we're just lucky. I think that we would slowly appeal to different artists foundation. Hopefully, Paula Krasner Foundation would consider doing the same. I think the first one came on board, very beginning, was Dadeless Foundation, which is Robert Motherwell Foundation. It's been amazing since gradually I knew that it would be their support that would provide the real stability. And I'm grateful to all of them, really, you know.
SpeakerYeah. And you couldn't have known that beforehand.
Speaker 3Not really, except that you you you admire the journey of those artists who I mentioned.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3You know, they sustain the up and down of their career, uh, but they're committed to their vision as artists.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Uh Willem de Koonin, um actually I just spent three hours long visit to Carol Janice, the son of the legendary Sidney Janice, exactly. And he was telling me about it was Lillian Shapiro who came with my Shapiro to pay the visit, the famous visit of the Coonin Woman One, the painting that he's about to throw out, was under the bed.
SpeakerUm which is the painting you saw at MoMA, which changed your life.
Speaker 3That's right. But you know, that legendary show, the only thing that was sold was Woman One that Alfred Boer bought with Marshall Piro encouragement. He had to go back to work as a house painter. Laconin was born in 1904. His first show was at Charles Egan, 1948, so he was 44 years old. You can imagine he took pride being a house painter. I don't think he would amass a considerable wealth where he could begin building his dream studio in in Montauk until 1965. That's a long time to be a house painter.
SpeakerWho was the artist who was a plumber?
Speaker 3Oh, well, I mean, that's the that that was actually uh people say that when you mean the composer, Philip Glass.
SpeakerComposer Philip, yes, yes, he was a plumber.
Speaker 3He was a good plumber also.
SpeakerWell, Fang Bui, lighting the path ahead. Thank you again for being here. It was a pleasure.
Speaker 3Pleasures my thank you for having me in this podcast. I'm impressed with this undertaking, a new journey of yours. So congratulations.
SpeakerThank you so much.
Speaker 3And uh yeah, amofate, you all. Ciao.
SpeakerIf this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at Roosy Hive. If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at roostyhive.com. And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at roostyhive.com. Original music and sonic identity for the Roosy Hive by Ant Food. Until next time, let your life be a creative act.