Thái Hà
ON DA DREAM

10 August – 12 October 2024
Galerie Quynh • HCMC 
A solo exhibition by Vy Trịnh
Curated by Thái Hà

x Showcasing a series of new sculptures spread across three floors as well as a site-responsive sculptural installation, ON DA DREAM 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 flood 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 floor—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 defined by whatever available space one could fit 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 reconfigures 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 traffic of objects, different 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.

A note on the display of the curatorial texts in ON DA DREAM as a calendar

The motorbike repair shops of Saigon carry a slew of tools to help you fix your means of transportation so you can quickly be on your way. Clamps, spanners, wheel balancers and tire pumps are strewn across the floor, workshop tables, or hung on racks that hold cables, windbreakers, and messes of spare chains.

On the wall, too, are tearing calendars to help you keep the days. Jagged solar and lunar times are displayed side by side and, tearing, the days chase one another, forever behind and ahead.

In keeping with ON DA DREAM and Vy Trịnh’s transformation of materials through their very ordinariness, the text is presented as a calendar. Holding the pages in your hand, its words become tangible, perhaps, just as the words themselves try to capture Trịnh’s sculptural language in a knowingly futile yet necessary way. The calendar exists as a meeting of verbal and physical language that twist, curl, and bling, resting on each other for balance. Readers are free to take the pages home, crumple them in pockets, or repurpose them, as they so often are, as wrapping paper for their morning sticky rice.

Press
   Frieze: “The Aspirational Velocity of Vy Trịnh’s Sculptures”
   Artforum Critic’s Pick: “Vy Trịnh” x
Artist
   Vy Trịnh

Curator
   Thái Hà

Exhibition identity & Design
   Xuan Phan

Production advisor
   Le Ba Quoc Hung

Installation
   Le Quoc Truong, Nguyen Thanh Phong, Nguyen Van Khai, Toho Vina Group Co., Ltd, Minh Chuong Construction Co., Ltd
Production assistance
   Tran Thi Lan, Tran Thi Thu Hang, Tran Quang, Tran Tuan Huy, Le Nguyen Phuong Ky, Hoang Phuoc Huyen Trang, Nguyen Truong Son, Nguyen Thanh Lam

Exhibition documentation
   Tung Nguyen (Ardent Narration), Thong Le, Natalie Suen

Translation
   Vinh Son

Studio 251
   Lai Minh Ngoc, Ngo Nguyen Dinh Dinh, Duong Gia Ky, Nguyen Anh Tuan, Dang Thi Thao Van, Le Uyen Thu, Nguyen Thao Ngan, Nguyen Trieu Thao Nguyen, Nghiem Gia Bao
Quynh Pham, Robert Cianchi & the Galerie Quynh team
   Pham Anh Ngoc, Hoang Anh Thu, Bích Trâm, Pham The Vu, Tilly Winter-Shipkov, Tien Vu, Le Chan Tran

Special thanks to
   Trinh Quang The, Tran Phi Diep, Trinh Tran Nhat Vy, Trinh Vinh Khang, Darius Sadighi, Stefan Khánh