Posts by Karlie Ho

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.

Đọc bài Tiếng Việt 

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. Vu's creative process begins with conceptualization and detailed sketching, followed by 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 director, 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.

The exhibition begins outside, at the gallery’s façade, with 'Echo from the Lake,' a site-specific work produced for this presentation. Two floor-to-ceiling canvases, partially veiled by draped orange cloth, face the glass frontage, creating a layered visual experience for viewers both inside and out. Referencing the Vietnamese architectural tradition of connecting indoor and outdoor spaces, the piece offers a contemporary reinterpretation of this cultural concept. Natural light casts shifting shadows through the work, dynamically altering perceptions of depth, materiality, color, and form. As visitors transition from exterior to interior, the work foreshadows the exhibition’s recurring themes: the blurring of boundaries between object and environment. Nearby, 'Green XXI,' 'Green XXII,' and 'Green XXIII' are installed at right angles along the curved wall. In each, two silk panels are seamlessly joined, with textured green fabric flowing across the canvases and around sharp corners—challenging the traditional flatness of painting and invoking Vietnamese textile forms to explore space and dimensionality. On the second floor, a canvas suspended from the ceiling by wooden supports dominates the space. It hovers in dialogue with the room’s raw industrial elements—exposed ductwork, concrete floors, and stark white walls—framing the work as both object and spatial intervention.

From a distance, Vu’s textile works may resemble abstract color field paintings, but closer inspection reveals intricate dimensionality. Shifting hues and organic forms evoke geological landscapes while reflecting deeper intersections of history, identity, and memory. This exhibition not only marks a significant milestone in Vu’s career but also contributes to the broader discourse on hybridity in contemporary Vietnamese art, offering an introspective view into the liminal spaces artists navigate between cultures.

Creatives in Conversation is a newsletter by Sophie Dieudonnee and Karlie Ho, active from 2023 to 2024. It features accessible conversations with artists, designers, and curators, offering insights into the current artistic climate without all the complicated words. Based in Rotterdam, NYC, and Hanoi, the project connects readers with creative voices from around the world through short, thoughtful interviews.

Interviews have featured a wide range of voices, from internationally recognized figures like Steve McQueen—whose work was recently on view at Schaulager during Art Basel, to emerging artists such as Miko Veldkamp, Do Trong Quy, and Dennis Kaiser. The newsletter also spotlights artists and other creatives working across diverse geographies and disciplines.

Link to the newsletter 

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Creatives in Conversation là bản tin của Sophie Dieudonnee và Karlie Ho, hoạt động từ năm 2023 đến 2024. Bản tin bao gồm các cuộc trò chuyện dễ hiểu với các nghệ sĩ, nhà thiết kế và giám tuyển, mang đến những góc nhìn sâu sắc về bối cảnh nghệ thuật hiện tại mà không cần đến những ngôn từ phức tạp. Giữa  Rotterdam, New York và Hà Nội, dự án kết nối độc giả với những tiếng nói sáng tạo từ khắp nơi trên thế giới thông qua những cuộc phỏng vấn ngắn gọn, sâu sắc.

Các cuộc phỏng vấn có sự góp mặt của nhiều tiếng nói đa dạng, từ những nhân vật nổi tiếng quốc tế như Steve McQueen - người có tác phẩm gần đây được trưng bày tại Schaulager trong khuôn khổ Art Basel, cho đến những nghệ sĩ mới  như và Miko Veldkamp, Đỗ Trọng Quý, và Dennis Kaiser. Bản tin cũng giới thiệu các nghệ sĩ và những người sáng tạo khác hoạt động trên nhiều lĩnh vực và địa lý khác nhau.

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