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, Jacqueline Lâm, 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.

Repetition offers another way for life to continue. In Jacqueline Lâm's đời sống, 88 drawings on Dó paper unfold through the repeated inscription of the Chinese characters 木 (tree) and 林 (forest). The same calligraphic brush is used across all 88 works where growth emerges gradually. Through the accumulation of repeated gestures, each mark quietly carries traces of the last.

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.

Inside the Landscape

— Nguyễn Phương Linh’s installation

The installation extends a material language that Nguyễn Phương Linh has developed over many years. She has worked with PVC since 2018, drawn to its contradictory qualities: industrial yet flexible, translucent yet substantial, artificial yet strangely skin-like. In BREATHE, her 2025 collaboration with Trương Quế Chi, PVC membranes became part of an installation conceived through bodily vulnerability, care and healing. This investigation continues in Qi, Linh’s concurrent presentation at the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, where images of soil from a cemetery in Karakalpakstan appear on translucent PVC membranes animated by pneumatic movement, rising and falling in rhythms suggestive of breath. để đó carries that investigation into another form. Landscapes are digitally transformed before being printed onto translucent PVC, their original geography gradually dissolving until what remains suggests tissue, veins, blood or the surface of an organ.

Acupuncture needles pierce Tooth and Skin; a fish hook pulls upward through Pulse 1; a metal spike tapers to a sharp point as it forces its way through the PVC, the membrane bunching and buckling around the wound in Pulse 3; while Pulse 2 hangs from the ceiling, its own weight drawing the PVC downward like a piece of flesh suspended in mid-air. The PVC begins to read as skin rather than simply a support for an image. The punctures are precise, almost clinical, yet their effect is visceral. Thin surfaces stretch, fold and suspend themselves around the objects that pierce them, appearing vulnerable while continuing to hold their form.

The landscapes themselves begin from an intentionally unstable premise. For this series, Phương Linh begins with stock images found through the deliberately understated search term “neutral landscape”, a phrase that carries its own contradiction. A landscape can appear empty, anonymous or untouched, yet no place exists outside history, geography and the forces that have shaped it. Phương Linh’s transformations push these ostensibly neutral images further from geographical identification, allowing them to become something more bodily and ambiguous. Geography gradually gives way to anatomy. The images are digitally transformed until their forms begin to resemble flesh, blood and internal tissue. A dark vertical formation might recall tree bark, while another evokes the layered depth of a canyon, its dark red tones suggesting coagulated blood or exposed tissue. Land and body begin to occupy the same visual territory, each capable of carrying traces of damage, endurance and time. In Phương Linh’s images, the land does not disappear; it changes register, becoming intimate and corporeal. The body, too, carries what has happened to it. Both can bear scars without ceasing to exist.

Light changes the character of the room as deliberately as the materials do. Under bright, cool-white illumination, the installation becomes almost clinical: red PVC against white walls, its dark markings resembling bruises, clotted blood or shadows beneath translucent skin. This clinical atmosphere carries a personal resonance for Phương Linh. She has spent periods in hospitals while caring for her father and son, as well as during her own hospitalisation for acute asthma, experiencing the body under the same cold light, surrounded by IV lines, needles, instruments and systems of care. These experiences shaped her understanding of breath as something both biological and political, and of the body as a terrain where endurance, pain and resistance are inscribed. Under the programmed spotlights, the atmosphere shifts completely. Individual surfaces catch the light, reflections travel across the PVC and the translucent images become more pronounced, making the works feel less like flat sheets and more like illuminated fragments of an interior body. As brightness gathers and recedes, the installation seems to contract and release, recalling the rhythms of breathing and circulation without attempting to reproduce them literally. The contrast between clinical illumination and theatrical spotlighting therefore becomes part of the work’s bodily language, moving between observation and exposure, care and vulnerability.

By the time the viewer moves deeper into the room, the landscape has almost disappeared. What remains is red, translucent and pierced: surfaces that could be read as skin, membranes, wounds or geological strata. The installation asks us to move between these readings rather than settle on one. A body becomes a landscape; a landscape becomes a body. What appears fragile continues to hold its form. What has been damaged does not necessarily disappear. The PVC does not conceal its wounds. It holds them in suspension, allowing the landscape, the body and everything they have endured to remain visible.

The Grass Keeps Growing

— Đỗ Thanh Lãng

A boat drifts through an open landscape; figures move across impossible surfaces; a group of women exercises in a park; chairs wait in an otherwise empty space. Familiar moments of everyday life are brought together with fragments of recollection and imagination, creating scenes that feel at once peaceful, humorous and slightly unsettling.

The series The Legend of the Lawn Mower groups together works that emerge from Lãng’s dream narratives rather than from a single fixed subject. He dreams of a motorcycle flying into the sky, carrying tourists tied to enormous balloons. The ride turns violent when the woman driving crashes and dies while the tourists survive. As her body lies on the grass, the grass continues to grow. Upon waking, Lãng realises that the sound he had heard in the dream was not a motorcycle at all but his father’s lawn mower. Something entirely ordinary has been transformed, in sleep, into something absurd and strangely tragic.

This movement between the familiar and the improbable runs through the four paintings presented in the exhibition. Lãng observes the world around him closely but does not simply reproduce what he sees. Everyday scenes become fragments that can be rearranged through association and imagination. The women exercising together in matching outfits, for instance, carry a distinctly familiar Vietnamese quality: an unremarkable scene of daily life that, when isolated and placed within Lãng’s visual world, becomes almost theatrical.

A lawn mower becomes a motorcycle; a park becomes a stage; a boat appears to float somewhere between landscape and recollection. The logic of the dream does not replace reality so much as reveal another possibility within it.

The paintings also mark a subtle shift in Lãng’s material practice. Known for working with layers of resin, he experiments here with silicone glue, creating a more restrained sense of depth. The layering does not immediately reveal itself. Seen from one angle, the surface can appear relatively flat; as the light changes or the viewer moves, other layers begin to emerge. What initially seems flat becomes spatial, asking the viewer to look a little longer and allow what was hidden to come forward.

A Garden Still Becoming

— Nadège David

Flowers, roots, leaves and unfamiliar bodies gather into dense formations that seem to be growing, blooming and transforming all at once. Nadège David’s Nebulous Landscapes appear carefully composed, almost symmetrical. Look longer and that order begins to collapse. A flower becomes a body, a root suggests a limb, and somewhere within the vegetation, an unfamiliar creature seems to be taking shape.

David has long explored the unstable boundaries between human, animal and plant, and in these recent paintings those distinctions dissolve further. Figures are no longer simply placed within a landscape; they emerge from the same living network of flowers, roots and foliage. The environment becomes less a backdrop than a body — continually growing, changing and reorganising itself. Yet this fluidity is held within a quiet structural tension. The central compositions recall botanical specimens, altarpieces or carefully arranged gardens, but the life within them refuses to remain still. Dark, saturated greens suggest depth and interiority, while pinks, yellows and pale forms push through the foliage like blossoms or living matter. The paintings feel less like representations of nature than living organisms in mid-growth, still in the process of becoming.

The instability also recalls the grotesque traditions of Northern Renaissance painting, particularly the hybrid creatures of Hieronymus Bosch and the anomalous juxtapositions found in Pieter Bruegel the Elder. David does not quote these historical forms directly; rather, she shares their fascination with a world in which the familiar and the impossible can exist together, and where bodies resist fixed categories. Nothing in these paintings has quite arrived at its final form. Their odd anatomies seem less invented than evolved, as though they have grown into one another over time.

Roots in Plain Sight 

— đời sống by Jacqueline Lâm

Eighty-eight sheets of Dó paper unfold as a quiet act of repetition. Jacqueline Lâm inscribes two Chinese characters: 木 (mù), meaning tree or wood, and 林 (lín), meaning forest. The relationship between them is deceptively simple: 林 is formed by placing two 木 characters together: one tree becomes two, two become a grove. Across the sequence, this small linguistic transformation becomes a way of thinking about how identity is formed — not as something singular, but through accumulation, relation and time.

林 also carries personal significance for Lâm. Read as lâm in Vietnamese, it is the character associated with the Vietnamese surname Lâm, which shares historical origins with the Chinese surname 林. Language becomes a point of entry into family history and belonging, as a name can carry traces of language, place and ancestry across generations.

Handwritten in Chinese ink on Dó paper, a traditional Vietnamese handmade paper long used in Vietnamese painting and printmaking, the work brings together several cultural registers: Chinese script, Vietnamese language, Vietnamese material tradition, and the personal history of an artist whose life has unfolded across different places. The material itself becomes part of this encounter between languages and histories.

The work begins with a single 木, carefully placed on an otherwise open sheet. As the sequence progresses, Lâm traces and repositions the characters, sometimes following the placement of a previous mark, sometimes allowing one form to shift into another. 木 encounters 木; 林 begins to emerge. Across the eighty-eight sheets, the marks grow denser, overlapping like branches or roots until the original surface of the Dó paper is gradually obscured.

Time enters the work through the slow accumulation of each mark, as the series unfolds across a sustained period of making. This process turns the work into a record of time and attention, but also of reconnection. Lâm is not necessarily searching for a lost origin; rather, she traces a thread that has remained present through a name, a language and a material history.

Like the characters themselves, the number eighty-eight suggests that meaning can continue to unfold beyond any single mark. Read horizontally, the number 8 becomes the symbol for infinity: a continuous loop with no beginning or end. Repeated as 88, this form suggests continuity multiplied, an ongoing movement that exceeds any single image or moment. Within the individual sheets, the sequence becomes something open-ended rather than conclusive. The work does not arrive at a final answer; instead, its meaning unfolds through the relationship between each part and the whole.

Installed without frames or glass, the sheets remain directly exposed: paper, ink, gesture and time. Their gradual shift from openness to density can be seen across the installation. đời sống does not illustrate belonging; it enacts it. One tree becomes a forest, and a collection of individual marks becomes a place to locate oneself.

A Constellation of Small Things

— Linh San

Linh San’s mezzanine space opens into a different register. Where Châu’s wooden frame occupies the room with weight and scale, Linh San’s pieces hover, scatter and recede: porcelain moons, minute architectural structures and almost transparent notation suspended against the light. Together, they create an atmosphere that feels less like a room of objects than a constellation of delicate systems.

In 12 moons, Linh San presents twelve individually hand-formed porcelain moons, each carrying subtle variations in shape. Corrugated cardboard is used almost as a mould, with Linh San first shaping the desired surface, accounting for its raised and recessed areas, before gradually applying extremely thin layers of recycled porcelain. The porcelain itself comes from Linh San’s own earlier works that had taken form but remained unfired. These works are left to dry completely, then broken down and rehydrated, returning to a workable state before becoming material for a new work. What might otherwise remain unfinished or be discarded is therefore carried forward into another form. Each layer is applied gradually, allowed to partially dry, and then built upon by the next, slowly constructing the form until each moon reaches its desired thickness. Some appear full, others partially obscured or fragmented, as though passing through different phases or veiled by cloud. The title points towards the lunar cycle and the twelve-part rhythm of a year: a complete cycle takes approximately 29.5 days, while lunar phases have long served as a natural measure of time across cultures. Yet the series resists the neatness of a calendar. Each moon occupies its own position, distinct yet inseparable from the constellation around it.

Two Untitled pieces shift the scale from astronomy to invented architecture. Suspended in the middle of the mezzanine, the works are built up line by line, with liquid clay squeezed through a small metal nozzle to form a continuous thread. One line is layered over another, with pauses between layers allowing the clay to dry slightly before the next is added. The process recalls the additive logic of 3D printing, where a structure takes shape through successive deposits of material, but instead of being controlled by a machine and a precise sequence of commands, every line remains subject to the movement, pressure and steadiness of the artist’s hand. The resulting forms resemble miniature architecture — walls, corridors, chambers and branching pathways, like an ant nest exposed from below ground, its intricate network of passages gradually revealing itself. Each develops its own rhythm and density, suggesting an internal order that feels organic rather than engineered.

The material, however, does not remain entirely obedient. Thin clay can bend, warp and collapse under its own weight; gravity gradually alters what began as a controlled gesture. Linh San establishes the conditions, then allows the material to determine part of the work’s final form. The result holds intention and contingency together, somewhere between architecture and organism.

Language takes another physical form in overcast. The work emerged from Linh San’s 2025 artist residency in Japan, where she spent time in Nishinari, Osaka, speaking with local women about their mothers and grandmothers, their everyday lives, and the embroidery and knitting club they attended each week. It was through these encounters that Linh San was introduced to knitting charts — systems of symbols used to guide the making of textiles. The stories she heard travelled between English, Japanese and Vietnamese before passing into these diagrams, moving through several layers of language, meaning and interpretation.

Rather than treating translation as a passage towards a fixed meaning, Linh San allows each transition to alter what came before. A conversation becomes language, language becomes a personal system of symbols, and those symbols are transformed once again into drawing. What began as an exchange between people is gradually displaced into another visual language, retaining traces of the original while becoming something entirely its own.

The choice of washi, a traditional Japanese paper, deepens this process. Exceptionally thin yet remarkably resilient, the paper allows the work to hover between image and surface. Linh San works directly onto its surface with Japanese ink and a wooden toothpick, replacing the conventional brush or pen with a tool capable of producing extraordinarily fine marks. The result sits somewhere between writing, diagram and textile pattern.

Afterimage

— Ngô Đình Bảo Châu

Ngô Đình Bảo Châu’s Afterimage resembles scaffolding and brings to mind the raw skeleton of a building before its walls and surfaces have been added. Above and around it, everything begins to shimmer. A black mesh hangs from the five-and-a-half-metre ceiling, threaded with crystal beads that cascade downwards like a waterfall, the net imparting a sense of play to the installation and recalling the open-ended space of a child’s playground.

The wood, initially appearing like foam, invites a closer look. Its joints are not simply fixed together with nails, but carefully shaped so that one piece meets and locks into another. This manner of construction recalls the logic of mộng¹, the interlocking joints found throughout traditional Vietnamese timber architecture, where the strength of a structure depends on the precision of its connections. Each joint carries the imprint of a hand measuring, cutting and fitting wood until separate pieces become one — an architecture of patience, precision and interdependence.

Scaffolding is usually temporary: it supports another structure while it is being built, then disappears, dismantled and put away. Here, Châu brings the scaffold to the foreground and gives it a life of its own. Its rigid frame is softened by mesh and dressed in glittering beads; even the ground beneath it is transformed from the dust and debris of construction into a dark, shimmering surface. What once existed to support something else becomes the thing we are asked to look at.

A sense of play continues upstairs in a single painting that sits apart from the installation yet echoes its atmosphere. A playground slide emerges within a shifting landscape of bright colour, dark trees, architectural forms and floating images. It feels less like a depiction of a playground than a dreamlike landscape, where familiar forms drift between the real and the imagined.

The painting continues a line of thought from Châu’s 2025 solo exhibition projecting a thought, where fragmented scenes moved between recollection, imagination and shifting spaces. Like Afterimage, it carries something forward rather than beginning anew: an image reappearing in another form, altered by the distance it has travelled.

Afterimage itself began with The Body of Dream, retaining elements of its wooden structure while carrying them into another configuration. What remains is neither reconstruction nor disappearance, but a trace — remnants, joints, openings and voids that allow the earlier work to persist while becoming something else.

Something that might ordinarily be dismantled, stored away or left behind is instead allowed to remain, transformed but not resolved. The scaffold becomes a playground; the playground becomes an image; and somewhere between the two spaces, something lingers like an afterimage — no longer the thing it was but not entirely gone.

1  Mộng refers to a traditional woodworking joint (essentially a mortise-and-tenon connection) where one piece of wood is cut to fit into another rather than simply being nailed together. This type of joint is documented in traditional Vietnamese timber architecture, including wooden houses and the architecture of Huế.