Artist: Vy Trịnh
Exhibition title: On Da Dream
Curated by: Thái Hà
Venue: Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Date: August 10 – September 21, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City
The Power of Dreams
– HONDA
Galerie Quynh is thrilled to present ON DA DREAM, a solo exhibition by Vy Trịnh, curated by Thái Hà. Showcasing a series of new sculptures spread across three foors as well as a site-responsive sculptural installation, the artist’s frst show with the gallery blurs the distinction between its exhibition rooms and the streets and pavements just beyond the gallery’s courtyard. In the works of Vy Trịnh, the streets are not just places to pass through but a living environment that borrows and morphs materials, creating methodologies and sculptures through the bundling and stacking of commodities that spill out of shop fronts to food pavements. Reappropriating highly manufactured objects and media as raw materials, Trịnh grinds, bends, wraps, ties, burnishes, and adds bling. Metal, ribbons, and bead chains are grounded—balancing directly on the gallery foor—and yet buzz with potential movement.
On the streets, stillness is an impossibility; pausing is not an option; you may never fully grasp your surroundings in their entirety. Positive and negative space are defned by whatever available space one could ft into. Moving goods, objects, and motors melt into the large and elusive material-semiotic environment.
An ode to the city dwellers, manual workers, and mass-produced automotive objects that inhabit the streets together in a blur of movement, ON DA DREAM reconfgures the gallery as an extension of the chaotic world outside. Trịnh‘s sculptures impart visual and textural cues to trace the life cycles of commercial goods, material ecologies and local economies. A blending of interior and exterior, her works are always “becoming”, following the trafc of objects, diferent forms of gendered labour and agency, and the sites where these categories are constantly being negotiated and improvised.
In ON DA DREAM, dreams are always grounded, always in motion, and always at full speed.
ABOUT VY TRỊNH
Vy Trịnh (b. 1996, Ho Chi Minh City) is a sculptor whose work explores how networks of objects extend beyond themselves and refect the larger socio-economic textures and conditions of contemporary Vietnam. Materials and objects are sourced from diferent economies and ecologies—infrastructural, automotive, electric, discarded. Methodologies and material content are intertwined, insisting on resourcefulness and a makeshift ethos indebted to the city’s polyrhythmic, cyclical, and sedimented material environment.
Vy holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. In 2023, she presented her frst solo project, Overvoltage, at Gia Lam Train Station in Hanoi, Vietnam. Vy has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including at Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Shisanwu LLC (Queens, NY), Worthless Studios (Brooklyn, NY), Atelier (Philadelphia, PA), Automat (Philadelphia, PA), White Columns (New York, NY), and Gallery MC (New York, NY). She was the recipient of the 2022 Christopher Lyon Memorial Award. That same year, she received grants from the Humanities Urbanism Design Initiative (H+U+D), The Sachs Program for Art Innovation, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Vy currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City and New York.
ABOUT THÁI HÀ
Thái Hà is a curator and translator whose practice centres speculation, dreaming, play, and improvisation. Hà was a participant of the 12th Berlin Biennale Curator’s Workshop, directed by Reem Shadid. Between 2020–2021, with support from Galerie Quynh, she received a grant to produce CáRô—an arts education workshop for highschool students in Saigon. In 2018, she co-founded the now-dormant Indigo Magazine, a London-based platform for new voices from Southeast Asian arts and beyond. Her translations can be found in publications by the Tate St Ives, Carnegie Museum of Art, Asian Art Biennial, ArtReview, and NUSASONIC. In 2023, together with Ném Space, Hà organised Films for liberation: Palestine forever, an action of unwavering solidarity that turns to cinema as a tool for mobilisation and education; the month-long programme travelled from Saigon to Hanoi, Kobe, and Tokyo.
Hà holds an MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa from SOAS, and a BSc in Psychology and Language Sciences from UCL. She is currently working at Nguyen Art Foundation as a curator.
ABOUT GALERIE QUYNH
Recognized as Vietnam’s leading contemporary art gallery, Galerie Quynh has been actively promoting contemporary art practice in the country for over two decades. The gallery maintains a consistent and focused program promoting emerging, mid-career and established artists in Vietnam and internationally.
Operating in a country that lacks a strong art ecosystem, the gallery is a hybrid space that serves its community through its public programs and support of art education. The gallery regularly collaborates with artists, curators, museums, and cultural organizations locally and overseas to organize talks and lectures as well as produce publications in English and Vietnamese.
In May 2014 the gallery founded the not-for-proft educational initiative Sao La directed by artists Tung Mai and Nguyen Kim To Lan. Sao La has since evolved into an independent artist collective spearheaded by To Lan and Dalat-based artist Nguyen Duc Dat.
The gallery was founded in the year 2000 by Quynh Pham and Robert Cianchi and opened its frst dedicated exhibition space in 2003.
