để đó: Group Exhibition

An exhibition is sometimes regarded as an ending, a completion, a culmination. Works arrive with titles, dates and materials, taking their place within the apparent certainty of the gallery. Yet what appears complete is often only a brief moment within a much longer life. Artworks leave their place of making only to enter new conversations, new contexts and new relationships. They are installed and dismantled, remembered and forgotten, revisited, relocated and reimagined. Their meanings continue to shift long after the moment of conception.

It is within this understanding that Galerie Quynh presents để đó, a group exhibition bringing together existing and new works by Nadège David, Đỗ Thanh Lãng, Linh San, Ngô Đình Bảo Châu and Nguyễn Phương Linh. The exhibition itself becomes one configuration within the ongoing lives of these artworks, tracing the different ways they continue through material transformation, translation, reconstruction, intervention and mutation. An artwork's history is never exhausted by the moment of its making, but continues through circulation, encounter and reinterpretation.

The title, để đó, derives from a common Vietnamese expression that suggests putting something aside temporarily, leaving something where it is, or simply allowing it to remain. The phrase contains neither urgency nor abandonment. Instead, it proposes an openness towards duration and uncertainty, recognising that not everything arrives fully formed and that certain meanings only emerge through return, sustained attention and the passing of time.

The exhibition first encounters transformation through a material that has recurred throughout Nguyễn Phương Linh's practice for nearly a decade. Printed on translucent PVC, landscapes gradually relinquish the certainty of place, drifting towards the textures of flesh, bodily fluids and internal organs. Saturated in red upon red, the immersive installation engulfs the viewer. Within this space, the distinction between geography and the body becomes increasingly difficult to discern.

Not all transformations depend upon material remain tied to place or the body. Some persist through images that resist waking consciousness altogether. Emerging from images that linger after the mind stirs from sleep, Đỗ Thanh Lãng's paintings resist narrative while remaining emotionally poignant. Built through successive layers of acrylic, resin and translucent mediums, forms repeatedly surface and dissolve, allowing the paintings to extend the unstable logic of dreams beyond the moment of waking.

Persistence assumes another form in Nadège David's paintings. Here, persistence lies not in return but in perpetual mutation. Dense constellations of flowers, roots and bodily forms organise themselves around unexpected symmetries while refusing stable identities. Echoes of Northern Renaissance and Baroque grotesques surface not as quotation, but as ways of imagining bodies that exist in continual states of becoming. Human, vegetal and animal forms merge into speculative ecologies where strange anatomies seem less invented than evolved. Continuity resides not in permanence, but in an endless act of evolution, where life persists through its capacity to reorganize, adapt and generate new forms.

Images are not the only things that persist. Translation and fragmentation offer parallel ways through which artworks exceed the circumstances of their making. In Linh San's work, stories originating from conversations with women in Nishinari, Osaka pass between Japanese, English and Vietnamese before finding another language altogether: the notation of knitting charts. Translation here does not seek fidelity but opens the possibility that meaning may continue precisely because it remains capable of becoming something else. Across 12 moons, this same movement unfolds spatially. Individual porcelain moons remain dispersed yet inseparable from the constellation to which they belong, suggesting that continuity may be carried not through permanence or completeness, but through relationships that persist across distance.

Elsewhere, continuity is achieved not through preservation but through reconstruction in the work of Ngô Đình Bảo Châu. Existing wooden structures are neither preserved nor discarded but reassembled into a new spatial proposition that continues to carry traces of its previous incarnation – Silhouette of Mirage, originally exhibited at the Thăng Long Imperial Citadel in Hanoi. Wrapped in translucent mesh that evokes both architecture and safety netting, the structures remain suspended between stability and drift, becoming an ongoing negotiation between memory and transformation. Viewers move through a space where absence becomes as tangible as presence, and where previous forms linger without ever being fully restored.

Across the exhibition, no work returns unchanged. Each continues differently, acquiring new forms, new relationships and new ways of being encountered. Rather than existing as self-contained objects, the works remain open to circumstances that continually reshape what they are capable of becoming.

What remains open is whether an artwork can ever be fully encountered at all. Each exhibition becomes another moment within a much longer conversation—one that neither begins nor ends within the walls of the gallery, but continues through memory, movement, reinterpretation and return.