WRITING/PROJECT

Installation View, Le Phi Long, 2025, Paul Hughes Fine Arts. Courtesy of Karlie Ho and the artist. 

Paul Hughes Fine Arts

Church St, Maiden Bradley, United Kingdom

June 15 - July 5, 2025

Le Phi Long’s new site-specific installation presents a fabric intervention and video work made in Kampong Luong, a diasporic Vietnamese floating village on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake.

In dialogue with ancient Pre-Columbian textiles and sculptures from Chimu, Nazca, and Inca cultures also on view, Le’s work employs fabric as a conduit of gesture and movement. It reflects the ritual labor that defines life along the Tonle Sap–Mekong Delta borderlands and resonates with the ceremonial weight of the surrounding objects.

Curatorial text and installation development by Karlie Ho. 

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Tác phẩm sắp đặt tại chỗ mới của Lê Phi Long kết hợp thực hành nghệ thuật với vải mang tính can thiệp và video, trong đó phần video được thực hiện tại Kampong Luong – ngôi làng nổi của cộng đồng người Việt di cư trên hồ Tonle Sap, Campuchia – với sự hỗ trợ của Bert Ackley (Vinatapes).

Trong sự đối thoại với các hiện vật dệt và điêu khắc cổ đại thuộc các nền văn hóa Chimu, Nazca và Inca đang được trưng bày tại phòng tranh, tác phẩm của Long khai thác chất liệu vải như một dòng chảy của cử động và ký ức. Tác phẩm gợi nhắc đến nghi lễ lao động – yếu tố định hình nhịp sống dọc biên giới Tonle Sap – đồng bằng sông Cửu Long – đồng thời cộng hưởng với sức nặng nghi lễ toát ra từ những hiện vật cổ xung quanh.

Trong dự án này, Karlie Ho đóng vai trò hỗ trợ giám tuyển, đồng hành cùng Lê Phi Long để phát triển ý tưởng trưng bày và định vị triển lãm trong bối cảnh đối thoại quốc tế.

Installation View, Ravissement, Bui Cong Khanh, 2025. 

Gate Gate Gallery

March 17 - May 1, 2025

Bùi Công Khánh's Ravissement opens an intimate dialogue with his ongoing practice—carrying the weight of decades of artistic inquiry. Marking Gate Gate’s first exhibition since their relocation from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, the show unfolds within a hybrid café-gallery space, where the audience is invited to engage directly with Vietnam’s contemporary art discourse. At its center are metal hearts, recurring motifs in Bùi’s work, embodying the paradoxes of modern connectivity—at once mechanical and deeply intimate.

Bùi's sculptural language reclaims materials traditionally tied to Vietnamese craft and labor, repurposing them to assert autonomy over modernist tropes. True Color, a towering five-and-a-half-meter column of stacked ceramic cylinders in glossy cobalt and crimson, crystallizes Bùi's decades-long engagement with the medium. Meanwhile, Paravent, 2019–2020, a twenty-three-panel screen of jackfruit wood once used in Vietnamese fishing boats, becomes an ornamental barricade, its metal-wire motifs evoking both filigree and colonial mappings of the South China Sea. Across the floor, objects stretch, compress, and divide, embodying the collision of materiality, class, and consumerism.

In Gate of Family Agreement, 2014, a wooden gate bears the inscription of Vietnam's state-enforced "cultural family" standards, implemented during the 1990s socio-economic reforms. This bureaucratic framework—mandating healthy lifestyles, community participation, and, notably, the two-child policy—became integral to Vietnam's post-war national identity, even as the country pivoted toward market economics. Two installations, Saigon Slum and Tonight We Dream Too Long, merge digital assets and found objects to examine the social and psychological weight of wealth and power. Stacked wooden slabs, tin rooftops, and a live-feed camcorder transform a bricked hut into an eerie diorama of urban marginalization and surveillance, while an antique bed with a looping video suspends figures between sleep and wakefulness, collapsing past and present into transient, half-remembered spaces.

As viewers move through the space, they cross a threshold between public obligation and private resistance. Like Ravissement, the show evokes the Taoist wu-wei approach, where surrendering control allows for direct engagement with reality. Mirroring tensions between the familiar and unfamiliar, the personal and collective, these works pose open-ended questions shaped by their context and those who pass through them.

Read Vietnamese text here 

Text by Karlie Ho

Minh Dung Vu, Green XXI, Green XXII, Green XXIII, 2024. Acrylic and silk on canvas. 200 x 330 cm | in. Courtesy of the artist and Gate Gate. 

Gate Gate Gallery

September 22 - October 16, 2024 

When I feel homesick, I watch documentaries about Vietnamese history. Once, I read a research article on the Nguyễn Dynasty and Vietnamese customs by Phan Kế Bính. I delve into the histories of my family and country, listening to Chầu Văn music and the spiritual chants of the Vietnamese Tam Phu belief system. Engaging in this research draws me closer to Vietnam, easing my sense of loss. On Tết (Lunar New Year), I light an incense stick, and as its scent lingers, it stirs memories of my days there. I ask myself: 'How can I transcend the boundaries of what I was taught, such as techniques in visual arts?' While living there, I hesitated to try new things. I kept wondering what method or form of expression I should choose in my work, frequently recalling memories with my grandmother, a tailor. This serves as a starting point, using textiles as a medium to connect my art to personal history and cultural identity.

-Minh Dung Vu. 

Minh Dung Vu’s exploration of identity through Vietnamese traditions shapes his solo exhibition 'Around the White Road,' marking his first show in Vietnam. This site-responsive installation features fifteen works that investigate space, memory, and materiality, stemming from pivotal experiences: a 2018 visit to Bridget Riley's expansive London studio, where Vu felt his breath echo, and his encounter with Gate Gate's unique curved architecture. These moments catalyzed his creative process, leading him to capture visual elements and evoke sensations of absence within his compositions. By reinterpreting 'Around the White House' as 'Around the White Road,' Vu intertwines the gallery space with the viewer’s journey, merging object and environment. 

Over the past decade, the artist has created a body of work characterized by tactile surfaces, natural color tones, and organic forms. His move to Germany spurred a practice of fabric manipulation, altering how viewers perceive size and dimension while maintaining a connection to Vietnam's textile traditions. A consistent theme emerges in his recent pieces: large-scale canvases with minimalist compositions, often featuring a single, organically shaped fabric element against a neutral background. These works convey cultural, historical, and environmental narratives through their materials and forms rather than explicit imagery. His creative process starts with conceptualization and detailed sketching, then selecting materials—primarily silk, linen, or chiffon—and creating custom dye mixtures using natural pigments or indigo. As he stretches dyed textiles over frames, Vu acts more as a facilitator than a dirigeant, allowing the fabric to partially dictate the final form as it dries before being sewn onto canvas.

"The artist controls about 50% of the process; the rest is dictated by the work itself," Vu explains, encapsulating his philosophy of shared authorship.

Vu’s process-based practice, rooted in the global 1960s shift toward dematerialized and conceptual art, engages with Vietnam’s post-colonial avant-garde movement, negotiating indigenous craft traditions with international movements. The use of fabric carries cultural resonance and serves as a tactile medium for exploring displacement and memory, emphasizing direct contact with the material on the canvas rather than through a secondary medium like a brush. His work combines Eastern and Western dialogues, where relinquishing control in the creative process metaphorically reflects the fluidity of identity and cultural hybridity in a globalized world.

Text by Karlie Ho