How to Waterboard a Tech Bro
Opening: 06 PM, 29 Jan 2026
Exhibition: 11 AM – 07 PM, Wed – Sat, 29 Jan – 28 Feb 2026
on Tuesday: by appointment only
Galerie Bao
49 avenue Parmentier, Paris 11
From the organizer:
Galerie Bao is pleased to present How to Waterboard a Tech Bro, Trọng Gia Nguyễn’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Bringing together several bodies of work, the artist reflects on today’s darkening age of willful ignorance and unchecked power – technological and socio-political alike. An era shaped by fraudulent algorithms, complicit politicians, greedy broligarchs, and conservative memelords and their cruel pawns.
In 2021 a flood in New York destroyed a significant portion of Trọng’s artworks and archives, a material loss that inspired Perpetual Paintings, a series that exists initially as SketchUp files stored publicly on Google’s 3D Warehouse. These digital “paintings,” ranging across many forms (including photography and sculpture), can be downloaded and produced as needed, scrutinizing ideas of supply and demand, rarity, and ownership. Trọng regularly updates the files, thereby challenging the notion of a singular, definitive artwork,
In Vietnamese Soups Cans, a subset of Perpetual Paintings, Trọng reimagines Warhol’s iconic soup cans as Vietnamese varieties. Unlike the flatness of silkscreen prints, the VR files reveal each object in full 360 degrees. On their reverse sides, viewers encounter “poetic recipes” written by the artist, blending propaganda with subversion and dark humor. For this exhibition, Trọng prints one scene from the front and one from the back of a can, framing them together as a two-sided work. All files remain freely downloadable, reinforcing reproducibility as a central principle.
The 3D Warehouse also becomes an unexpected archive, as Trọng digitally reconstructs politically charged objects such as Breonna Taylor’s bullet-pierced clock and Jeffrey Epstein’s prison noose – presented here as a photograph and a painting, respectively. In an age of erasure and distortion, these files serve as inadvertent records, circulating each time they are viewed or downloaded.
A second series, The Diabolical, addresses justice and culpability more directly. These paintings reproduce height-line graphics sourced from police stations, movie posters, crime photos, and other cultural references. Installed at true-to-scale heights and painted the exact color of the walls they hang on, the paintings quietly “size up” the guilt quotient of each viewer, thus literally shifting power in favor of the artwork. Their raised lines and numbers remain visible through successive layers of paint, underscoring how justice persists even when suppressed. At Galerie Bao, the works are splashed with garish colors that bleed underneath them, dribbling into provocative texts that cast both populism – and Pop art – as forces rarely associated with subtlety.
Offering a playful respite, Win, Win presents a ping-pong table sliced in half and mounted against a mirror that completes the form through reflection. The viewer plays only against themselves, with no objective beyond competitive contemplation. The harlequin-patterned surface hints at wit (and wit’s end) tempered by melancholy, echoing the trickster figure from French folklore.
Trọng Gia Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American artist, writer, curator, and designer living and working between Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Brussels, Belgium. His diverse body of works examines the fragility of personal history and structures of power in their myriad forms.
Regularly employing humor while at other times engaging sober reflection, Trọng’s work elevates the condition of doubt as it reveals and disrupts the undercarriage of our most trusted spaces – domestic, cultural, political, and economical. His scope of production includes everything from painting, to installation, film, sculpture, performances, web-based projects, and iPhone applications.
Crossing over into design and fashion, he has collaborated with brands such as Ordinaire, LA Loop, Be&D, and Lacoste. Trọng has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), NON (Berlin), The Private Museum (Singapore), and Orange County Museum of Art (California), etc. His works are represented in notable private and public collections including Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, 21st Century Hotels, Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, Servais Family Collection, Foundation CAB, and many others.
Galerie Bao is a curator-led gallery founded by Lê Thiên-Bảo, a Vietnamese curator recognized for her long-standing commitment to contemporary art from Vietnam, extended to Southeast Asia, since 2016. Acting as a close ally to artists, Bao is dedicated to building sustainable relationships with artists and supporting the long-term development of their practices. Rooted in collaboration and care, the gallery goes beyond exhibition-making to foster communal dialogue and experimental thinking.
Bao has collaborated with a wide network of institutions and public collections, including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MUSEION (Bolzano), Han Nefkens Foundation (Madrid), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco / Paris), POUSH (Aubervilliers), The Outpost (Hanoi), Nguyen Art Foundation (Ho Chi Minh City), among others.
