Unclaiming the Body in Ngô Đình Bảo Châu’s ‘Projecting a Thought’

One of the best shows in Vietnam this summer was Projecting a Thought, curated by Thái Hà. It marks the first collaboration between two of Saigon’s most dynamic forces: Galerie Quynh, long established as the city’s anchor for contemporary art, and the younger Gallery Medium, which has quickly made a name as an experimental incubator. This pairing is not incidental. It signals a generational shift, a willingness to pool resources and energies to stage a show that is both conceptually ambitious and materially daring.

For Thái Hà, whose curatorial practice often attends to how art articulates the shifting conditions of social life, the project becomes a testing ground: how can thought itself be projected into matter, into space, into the body? The Ice Factory, with its cold gray concrete and cavernous volume, provides a fitting backdrop. Rarely used for exhibitions of this scale, it underscores the ambition of a collaboration that aspires to expand the coordinates of Ho Chi Minh City’s art scene.

The exhibition showcases a new body of work by Ngô Đình Bảo Châu comprising video installations, sculptures, monumental Trucchigraphy fibre works, and large-scale paintings. Together, these elements attempt to think of the body—not as a fixed vessel, but as a composite, mutable form, constantly in conversation with its environment. This is both a continuation and a reimagination of Bảo Châu’s 2020 solo exhibition Towards Realist Socialization, and it is immediately apparent that her concerns with the social body and the regenerative possibilities of destruction are still very much alive.

The first thing visible upon entering is the two-screen video installation a burn (2024). Here, water, fire, air, land, and sky converge in a single shot: a suggestion of destruction inseparable from creation and rebirth. The burning structure, a kitchen, repurposed from her prior collaboration with artist Nguyễn Đức Đạt and architect Laurent Serpe, becomes a portal. Flames consume, ashes scatter, but embers linger to give way to something else. It is as though the aperture of the screen itself reveals a new iteration of being.

In this way, a burn subtly recalls the Realist Socialization Project, which sought to bridge public and private spheres through ordinary domestic furniture. What once seemed an exploration of the domestic now smolders, grazed by fire, so that the body, social and individual alike, might regenerate in altered conditions. Those same contemplative gestures are on display here again, with renewed urgency.

Through the opening between the screens emerges and the ashes become fireflies (2025), an installation made with cracked earth and moving light. Here, ashes from earlier works, everything falls down, the flames go up (2020), are recycled into lantern-like containers, their flickers resembling trapped butterflies or miniature cosmos. Arranged like islands across red clay, the formation recalls the dykes and bends of the Mekong Delta. The world seems broken into composites: fragments of childhood memory, glimmers of night skies, reconstituted wonder. The installation invites wandering, reflection, and the uncanny sense that terrestrial and celestial are mirror images, each bouncing light back toward the other.

Looking upward, one encounters organs of the infinite (2019), which suspend overhead in airy delight. These silk panels, produced in collaboration with Việt Nam Trúc Chỉ Art, apply the traditional bamboo-based papermaking technique of Trucchigraphy to textile. Their surfaces are deceptively plain, yet closer inspection reveals moon-like textures: craters, valleys, blotches layered in infinite hues. As with the ashes below, these banners resist neatness—structured but porous, shimmery against the dark light, quiet reminders of the beauty in rot and ruins. Their scale suggests monumentality, yet their textures whisper intimacy. They are, in many ways, the stars of the show, expansive yet grounded, held between decay and lift, between time’s erosion and the ether’s promise.

The Ice Factory’s cold gray concrete frames these airy suspensions beautifully, a foil to their shimmering delicacy. Against this backdrop, tucked to the side, hangs a series of large-scale paintings that continue the throughline of breaking down bodily form. In where leaves remember skin (2025), organic ripples of blue and green evoke grasslands and flesh at once, abstracted yet tactile. In the stillness folds (2025), striated layers suggest terrestrial spheres, elements radiating, refracting, and trickling in playful abstraction.

Among these, the sculptural work eye of the moment (2025) anchors the room, occupying the center of the gallery’s painting side. It both grounds and extends the conversations unfolding around it, knitting together the wall-mounted canvases and installations with a bodily gravity.

Taken as a whole, Projecting a Thought demonstrates Bảo Châu’s breadth. She is not merely recycling motifs but reworking them, from ashes, silks, glass, clay into a cosmos of material resonances. The exhibition insists that the body is less a vessel than a reflection of worlds: organic, cosmic, historical. Its strength lies not in neat coherence but in its layered openness, its refusal to confine form to recognizable referents.

The effort here is commendable in scale as well as execution. The curated texts alone are essay-length, complementing a laborious and well-orchestrated installation. The tone of the show is serious without tipping into self-importance, ambitious without ostentation. There is still room for expansion, moments where the symbolism could breathe more, but as it stands, the curation hits all the right notes.

Those in the know have long been looking toward Vietnam’s contemporary art scene as the “new it girl.” Projecting a Thought makes clear why that attention is well placed. By daring to reimagine destruction as rebirth, by reconstituting the body as cosmos, it offers not only a reflection of Vietnam’s contemporary moment but also a bold affirmation of what art can project into thought, and thought into form.

Projecting a Thought: Ngô Đình Bảo Châu, curated by Thái Hà on view through September 10, 2025 at TDX Ice Factory, Ho Chi Minh City.

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