If you're wandering Đà Nẵng before November 8, two of the city's museums have quietly turned into a playground of oversized bamboo bugs, terracotta and silk — and entry won't cost you a đồng.

The Đà Nẵng Art Creatives Connection, running at the Đà Nẵng Museum and the Museum of Chăm Sculpture, centres on 'The Spirit of Bamboo', a set of installations by artisan Võ Tấn Tân and five craftsmen from Cẩm Thanh village near Hội An. The team, working out of Tân's Taboo Bamboo workshop, built enormous versions of the grasshoppers, fireflies, mantises and crickets that rural kids once caught in rice fields after school. The idea, Tân says, is nostalgia with a point: children raised amid rapid urbanisation rarely see these insects at all. His workshop has produced thousands of bamboo pieces over the years — furniture, custom lamps, pencil cases — many with clever interlocking joints so they can be flat-packed and shipped to hotels and homes.

There's more beyond the bamboo. A separate exhibition, 'Trading a Path/Remembering as Practice', pairs Vietnamese artists Bùi Công Khánh, Oanh Phi Phi and Trần Tuấn with Thai artists from Bangkok's Noir Row Art Space, including Marisa Srijunpleang and Panachai Chaijirarat. Chăm artist Kiều Maily shows terracotta work at the sculpture museum, alongside silk workshop demonstrations. In total the programme, titled 'History of Tomorrow', packs in 30 installations plus curator walkthroughs, artist talks and field sessions. It runs daily from 8am until late evening, free of charge, until November 8.

The timing is no accident. Đà Nẵng has built a reputation on fusing craft heritage with tourism: the city counts nearly 70 craft villages and about 3,000 workshops. It also sits within easy reach of an unusual stack of UNESCO listings — Hội An Ancient Town and Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary (both World Heritage), the Chàm Islands Biosphere Reserve, and the Ma Nhai cliff inscriptions on the Marble Mountains under the Memory of the World programme.

For travellers, this is a rare chance to see Vietnamese craft villages represented at gallery scale without paying museum fees. The bamboo insects double as a preview of what you can buy or commission in Hội An, where Tân's workshop and Cẩm Thanh's nipa palm groves are an easy day trip from Đà Nẵng. Come in the evening: the museums stay open late, and the city's beach strip is minutes away.