i let you win
Trần Quang Đại
Site-responsive installation & book launch
Garden Reading Room, Museum of the Home, London, UK
6 October 2026, 14:00–16:00
Co-curated with Audrey Chan.
Photo documentation by Ashley Ho.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Trần Quang Đại FRSA (b. 1992, Việt Nam) is a conceptual artist and poet with a background in criminal law. Trained in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London, his work brings together traditional media and socially reflective methods to navigate the silent spaces between ethics, belonging and the unseen architectures of power. Rooted in experiences of post-war Việt Nam and informed by post-internet thinking, his practice engages with questions of memory, identity and resilience, inviting reflection on the convergences of the self and the social.
i let you win is a poetry book and ongoing artistic project by artist and poet Trần Quang Đại. For its launch, the publication extends beyond the page into a site-responsive installation, placing the intimacy of the book within the Museum of the Home; a space where private lives, domestic histories and personal memories are collected and encountered.
The book is both autobiographical and universal. A year-long collection of tender, solitary and shared moments, this long-form poem considers how memory, trauma and identity are negotiated. The book deliberately uses simple, sparse language, leaving space for the reader; and for the complex feelings and memories it might evoke. Through scent, taste, sound and mundane yet familiar physical settings, Đại’s writing appeals to the senses, probing the subconscious and allowing what has been left unsaid, forgotten or buried to surface.
i let you win… in other words, I let myself lose. Does winning entail losing in some other form? The poem leaves one pondering: who is speaking, and to whom? Could this be a simple journal entry, a dialogue with another person, or a conversation with oneself?
i let you win is a journey, in no particular order, through grief, introspection, realisation, resentment and acceptance. Yet its gaze does not remain entirely inward. Through observations of others, relationships and the social worlds we inhabit, the poem considers how the self is shaped by and exists in relation to what lies beyond it. Along the way, perhaps, some form of the self is rebuilt, while the intimate becomes a way of recognising something shared, allowing empathy and compassion to be collectively formed.