Installation View, Ravissement, Bui Cong Khanh, 2025.
Gate Gate Gallery
March 17 - May 1, 2025
Bùi Công Khánh's Ravissement lays bare his heart—revealing enchanting emotions shaped by decades of practice. Marking Gate Gate's first exhibition since relocating from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, the show unfolds in a hybrid café-gallery space, where the audience becomes an active participant in Vietnam's contemporary art discourse. Central to the exhibition are metal hearts, recurring symbols in Bùi's work that embody the paradoxes of modern connectivity—mechanical yet 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.
Text by Karlie Ho