Thái Hà
Rhyming Gestures

08 August 2023 – 12 January 2024
Nguyễn Art Foundation • HCMC 
A group exhibition with Le Hoang Bich Phuong, Ngo Dinh Bao Chau, Nguyen Duc Phuong, Nguyen Minh Thanh,
Nguyen Quang Huy, Tuan Andrew Nguyen,  Phan Thao Nguyen, Tran Luong, and Truong Cong Tung
Curated by Nhat Q. Vo and Thái Hà


In Rhyming Gestures, artworks dance. From the materials that make them up they take on rhythm. Hopping and rolling from ceiling to floor, they mimic and riff on the gestures of their makers, whose ritual of artmaking is, itself, dancing.

Dance engages the body, an act of being that blends the frequencies of sound and movement in the world with those steeped deep inside our muscles. Rhyming Gestures ventures that artmaking, as in dance, does not manipulate materials towards the goal of producing objects. To dance, flesh is material. The object it produces is the dancing body, which is not an object at all, only a moment in time. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in Eye and Mind that artmaking is bodily: “it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings”. In making art, then, why wouldn’t the maker be dancing? Lending their body to the world, with each movement they lend the rhythm of their flesh memories. Pouring out of the body of the artist-as-dancer, rhythm saturates the artworks so that they, too, dance as a way to exist in the world.

The works in Rhyming Gestures dance out myths, magic, and dreams. They invites viewers to inhabit the danceness of making, to see the rhythms of flesh the body has always carried.

Artists
   Le Hoang Bich Phuong, Ngo Dinh Bao Chau, Nguyen Duc Phuong, Nguyen Minh Thanh,
Nguyen Quang Huy, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phan Thao Nguyen, Tran Luong, Truong Cong Tung

Curators
   Nhat Q. Vo and Thái Hà

Graphic design
   Nhat Q. Vo

Editors
   Bill Nguyen, Lai Minh Ngoc

Installation
   Nhung Le, Bao Khanh & Co.

Assistants
   Lai Minh Ngoc, Waylen Nguyen