projecting a thought
08 August – 10 September 2025
TĐX Ice Factory • HCMC
A solo exhibition by Ngo Dinh Bao Chau
Curated by Thái Hà
08 August – 10 September 2025
TĐX Ice Factory • HCMC
A solo exhibition by Ngo Dinh Bao Chau
Curated by Thái Hà
projecting a thought explores how the vastness of the world is reflected in the body and, concurrently, how the body projects itself onto the world. Branching from the critical inquiries of Ngo Dinh Bao Chau’s first solo exhibition in 2020, projecting a thought now reimagines the house as a body that inhales and exhales light, built on an architecture of the sensorial.
Everything falls down, the flames go up. More a promise (or warning) than a title, the name of her true-to-scale cardboard recreation of a Frankfurt Kitchen1—the centrepiece of her 2020 solo—is now realised in a burn. In this video artwork that opens projecting a thought, a gentle fire eats away at the cardboard then quickly rages; the kitchen crumbles, leaving only hot ash to echo its existence. The embers of the votive burning signal a transformation in Ngo Dinh Bao Chau’s methodology: she retains an affinity for collaging imagery from a wide range of references, though this time not with the piercing eye of analysis. Instead, she allows herself to look, unfocused and absent-minded, beyond the surface of the image to zoom in on infinity2.
With the wispy remnants of the kitchen, she reshapes the world to shape an internal world, making from literal ashes a galaxy of planets in orbit or insects busying the night sky. In and the ashes become fireflies, on cracked earth rests light in motion. Here, the body—a collective of the senses through which it experiences the world—takes shape through Bao Chau’s use of materials. Borrowing the Renaissance image of the cosmic body, the artist plays with vision’s correlation to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.
Positing that the body is inseparable from the world just as the body is a world, in organs of the infinite, Bao Chau freely drapes sheets of fabric-skin across the Ice Factory’s open space. On their surfaces, fibres of cornsilk, duckweed, and bamboo form images of cells that cluster as abstract organs. The artist lifts the veil to a landscape of our insides, though not with a medical precision that discerns the parts and their sum to be smaller than the whole. Rather, her delicate skins reveal the permeability of the sensorial and, palpably, its affective impact on every cell, vein, muscle, organ. The body breathes in and air fills the lungs; it breathes in light, and shadows cast.
Traversing darkness into the light, an exhale, and cells erupt as flora, rain, and jets of sunlight. Bao Chau dilates depth and bulges time in a series of works on canvas that depict fragments of surrealist scenes. The artist’s hyperbolic visual space foregrounds a bodily perspective in which scale and distance are not fixed, as per the dictates of Euclidean geometry3, but mutable, warping with the subject position of the observer and to the rhythm of their encounters. Arriving at eye of the moment, the minimalist sculpture offers viewers a place to rest, to take in the boundless paintings that surround it, or simply to be with other viewers whose coming and going form the work’s rhythm. A rumination on living time, rather than abstract time dictated by the handles on a clock, the work paces time as it is experienced—uncountable, endlessly becoming.
A congregation of eyes blinks light out the doors and sends the show’s vibrations with it. As the viewer makes their exit, so too does waterfall mark their body with its eye-shaped light. Exploring projecting a thought, the “body and [artwork] no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection”4. In an exhibition that wholly collapses the demarcations between the internal and external, the body emerges not as container but as assemblage, where ash, earth, and plant fibre co-constitute with human flesh a hybrid ecology, always in process, always in relation.
1. The work was created in collaboration with artist Nguyen Duc Dat and architect Laurent Serpe.
2. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Wiley-Academy, 2005), 46–49.
3. Hyperbolic space refers to a phenomenological model of visual perception in which depth and spatial relations are experienced as curved, elastic, and responsive to the body’s position. Unlike the fixed, infinite grid of Euclidean geometry, hyperbolic space warps with proximity: near objects appear stable, while the peripheries bulge or distort and distant horizons curve inward or upward.
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, 2004), 17.
4. Elena del Río, “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts”, Camera Obscura 13, no. 2 (1996): 101.
Press
Cultbytes: “Unclaiming the body in Ngô Đình Bảo Châu's ‘Projecting a Thought’
Ngo Dinh Bao Chau
Curator
Thái Hà
Quynh Pham, Robert Cianchi & the Galerie Quynh team
Pham Anh Ngoc, Hoang Anh Thu, Đan Thanh, Bích Trâm, Gia Ky, Pham The Vu, Tien Vu, Tilly Winter-Shipkov, Kim Bao Linh
Coca Huynh & the Gallery Medium team
Thao Nguyen Phan, Linnie Phan, Nguyen Dao Moc Mien
District Eight
Trang Nguyen, Hieu Tran, Huong Nguyen, Tien Le
Ngo Dinh Bao Vi, Ngo Dinh Bao Khoi
M&A Art Tiles Factory
Tran Thi Quynh Anh
L. Co Vietnam
Matt Lucero, Tram Kha Lucero
a burn artwork
Filming: Vu Viet Hung, Editing: Dao Tung, Colour grading: Hang Kira Kira
organs of the infinite artwork
Special thanks to Cong Tri for his support in the realisation of organs of the infinite
Vinh Son
Photography
TUM
Installation
Le Quoc Truong, Nguyen Van Khai, Thanh Phong, Nguyen Thanh Phuong, Phung Ai Tam, Nguyen Dang Due, Vo Phi Hong, Nguyen Phi Hoang Quan, Dam Tuan Anh, Huynh Vo Trung Kien, Hoang Vu, Dat Vu
Special thanks to
Ngo Dinh Qui, Dao Ca My, Dao Tung, Stefan Khánh, Brian Vy, Vic Vu, Thach Pham, Le Khac Huy, Nguyen Hoang Quoi Ngan, Le Kim Hung, Xuan Anh, Kieu, Hi Nguyen, Le Van Thanh, Thjn Pham, Bryan Yong, Trieu Vy, Craig Kapp, Mướp, Le Thi Hoang Nhung, Ben Devlin