projecting a thought
09 am – 06 pm, Tues – Sun, 09 Aug – 10 Sep 2025
TDX Ice Factory
19/45 Tran Dinh Xu, Cau Ong Lanh (formerly Cau Kho, District 1), HCMC
From the organizer:
In a significant and first-ever collaboration, Galerie Quynh and Gallery Medium are excited to present projecting a thought — an ambitious solo exhibition by Ngo Dinh Bao Chau curated by Thái Hà. Showcasing a new body of work comprising video installation, sculptures, monumental fibre works and large-scale paintings at the expansive TDX Ice Factory, the exhibition 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 her solo
exhibition Towards Realist Socialization 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 kitchen (1) — 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 infinity (2).
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. Her light-pierced 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 (3) foregrounds a bodily perspective that is mutable, warping with the subject position of the observer and to the beat of their encounters. Arriving at eye of the moment, the minimalist sculpture reflects on living time, rather than abstract time dictated by the handles on a clock. As the viewers’ coming, sitting, and going form the work’s rhythm, time is paced as it is experienced—uncountable, constantly becoming.
A congregation of eyes blinks light out the doors and sends the show’s vibrations with it. The viewer makes their exit and waterfall marks 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.
Appendix:
(1) The work was created in collaboration with artist Nguyen Duc Dat and architect Laurent Serpe.
(2) Juhani Pallasmaa, “The Significance of the Shadow”, in The Eyes of the Skin (UK: Wiley-Academy, 2005), 46–49.
(3) Vivian Sobchack, “Breadcrumbs in the Forest”, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (CA: 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.
About Ngo Dinh Bao Chau
Ngo Dinh Bao Chau’s practice challenges the dualisms and tensions that exist in contemporary society and the natural world. Incorporating a wide range of materials from sedge mats, steel, and concrete, to trúc chỉ—paper made from the purées of bamboo, corn and duckweed, the artist creates labour-intensive multimedia installations that require years of research and production. One of Bao Chau’s seminal projects included appropriated symbols belonging to a collective, cultural memory and placed in an imagined homespace, foregrounding the power of repetition and collapsing the distinction between public and private space. In her most recent work, Bao Chau reimagines the house as a pulsating, sensorial organism entangled in a complex ecology with our evolving world.
Born in 1986 in Dong Thap and educated at the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts, Ngo Dinh Bao Chau has held numerous exhibitions within Asia and abroad, including Half a day continues | That day, I was preparing to go out then it rained, organized by Sao La, 1/2 Gallery, Dalat; Towards Realist Socialization, curated by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City; Silk of light, Sàn Art Productions x Phuong My, Ho Chi Minh City; Nothing Special That Day–An Exit, University of the Arts Bremen, Bremen, Germany and Gia Lam Train Factory, Hanoi; Vietnam in Transition, 1976–Present, Wende Museum, Culver City, CA, USA; No Cai Bum: The Dreaming Dalat, Dalat; No Cai Bum, Hue; Am I Superwoman?, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City; Block of Silence, SECC, Ho Chi Minh City; Where The Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Bodies Survey(ed), Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City; She, organized by Sao La, Địa Projects, Ho Chi Minh City, travelled to Sweet ‘Art, London, UK and Little Pink Monster Gallery, TX, USA; Body Bouquet, Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Galleries, Atlanta, GA, USA; Out of Nowhere, Sao La, Ho Chi Minh City; and My eldest sister – Part 2: Eldest sister, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City. In 2025, Bao Chau was shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Sovereign Art Foundation, Hong Kong. In 2018, she was selected for the apexart Fellowship in New York, USA, and in 2010 undertook the 943 Studio arts residency in Kunming, China. In 2016, she received a grant from the Denmark-Vietnam Cultural Development and Exchange Fund for Open Room—an open studio event with artists Cam Xanh, Lap-Xuan N. Do, Kim Duy, and Dao Tung.
Ngo Dinh Bao Chau lives and works between Hue and Ho Chi Minh City.
About Thái Hà
Thái Hà is a curator, writer and translator based in HCMC, Vietnam. Her work explores speculative world-building and post-apocalypse aesthetics to imagine what emerges from colonial and capitalist ruins. Her curatorial projects, writings and translations have been presented and featured in various museums, cultural institutions, and biennales, such as the Tate St Ives, Barbican Centre, Carnegie International, Asian Art Biennial, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), Fulbright University Vietnam, An Viet Foundation, and Sàn Art, among others. Her work has been covered by Frieze, Artforum, and Al Jazeera.
Hà was selected as a resident at Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto (2024) and for the 12th Berlin Biennale Curator’s Workshop (2022). She holds an MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa from SOAS, University of London, and a BSc in Psychology and Language Sciences from University College London. She is currently Curator at Nguyen Art Foundation, and was previously Assistant Curator at Galerie Quynh.
AboutGallery Medium
Gallery Medium is a multifaceted contemporary art gallery that blurs the lines between art, design and interiors. Alongside being an online platform, Gallery Medium hosts exhibitions, private views and events, selling art in a curated setting. At Medium, we are driven by a singular mission: to dismantle the notion that art is exclusively reserved for the elite. Our goal is to make captivating and high-quality artworks accessible to all.
We aspire to build a dynamic platform that offers diverse avenues for people to immerse themselves in art. Whether through design, culinary experiences, music, or other mediums, we aim to provide unique and engaging encounters with creativity.
AboutGalerie Quynh
Galerie Quynh was founded in 2000 by Quynh Pham and Robert Cianchi as a non-profit online educational resource to document and archive the Vietnamese contemporary art scene. A physical space dedicated to a dynamic rotating program of exhibitions opened in December 2003. For over two decades, Galerie Quynh has operated as a hybrid space: a contemporary art gallery and an institution that serves its community through public and educational programs. Collaborating locally and internationally with artists, curators and cultural organizations with diverse creative voices, the gallery has also initiated a number of not-for-profit artist-run community projects such as Sao La led by Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan and Tùng Mai, and CáRô spearheaded by curators Thái Hà and Linh Lê.
