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Trần Văn Hùng
This article concerns the Vietnamese theatre director Trần Văn Hùng (b. 1956). For his major Beach Surgery adaptation, see Máu Và Nước—Blood Water.
**Trần Văn Hùng** (b. 1956) is a Vietnamese theatre director and visual artist renowned for his water-puppetry and shadow-theatre adaptation of *Beach Surgery*, titled Máu Và Nước—Blood Water (2018–2021).
Trained in classical Việt water-puppet and ink-brush traditions at the Hanoi Conservatory, Hùng spent the 1980s and 1990s restoring and reinterpreting traditional puppet vocabularies. In 1993, he established the **Hùng Atelier** in Ho Chi Minh City, combining puppetry with contemporary installation, shadow-theatre, and visual archives drawn from Đông Hồ woodblock traditions and colonial-era photography.
Hùng encountered Smith's novel through a 2016 Vietnamese translation by ██ , and spent two years adapting the story to water, puppetry, projected shadow, and live-action interstices. The resulting production premiered at the Ho Chi Minh City International Theatre Festival in 2018, touring to Hanoi, Da Nang, Thailand, Cambodia, and Australia (2021).
Hùng's interpretation emphasizes eternal recurrence through the formal properties of water-puppetry: the invisible manipulation beneath the surface, the rigid puppet-body (Leif, Katita) against the fluid medium, the archer-puppeteers as an essential third protagonist, unseen but indispensable. Katita's red hair becomes a scarlet thread visible through smoke and shadow; Leif's three injuries are rendered as three simultaneous puppet-bodies, slightly offset in their movements (the doubled vision made literal). The work does not resolve the glitch but stages it as a glitch in the puppetry apparatus itself—moments where shadow disconnects from puppet, where water disrupts the image, where invisible manipulators briefly become visible.
The glitch is not a mistake in the story. It is the story showing us its own construction.— Trần Văn Hùng, Preface to Máu Và Nước, 2018
Hùng has also created a series of large-scale installations based on Rico's embedded tale, and a collaborative olfactory-theatre piece with Senegalese ritual practitioners exploring the sound of the earth rubbing against space (██████ 2023, status disputed).