Referring to the cà phê võng providing rest and refreshment to drivers on Vietnam’s provincial highways, this first institutional survey of Art Labor’s activities, curated by Celia Ho, opens with an invitation: to sit (or lie) on a hammock and drink Vietnamese coffee brewed from robusta beans grown in the country’s Central Highlands. The staging of this vernacular rest-stop performs a spatial reconfiguration. No longer are we in Hong Kong, but somewhere in Tây Nguyên, located within the Southeast Asian Massif known as Zomia, its complex textures expressed by a chorus of sculptures, installations, and instruments created by Art Labor—founded in 2012 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung, and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran—and collaborators from the Indigenous Jarai community, with whom Art Labor have been working since 2016, alongside invited artists. Among them is musician and artist R Cham Tih, whose standing bamboo instruments in the gallery embody the recuperation of lost Jarai musical traditions through restorative innovation. While K’loong Put (2024) is a traditional xylophone, albeit with additional notes, Klek Klok (2024) is a new design drawing on traditional bamboo gongs used to deter wild birds from the fields. A dialectics of loss and recovery infuses this exhibition, …