The Phantom Rite

10 am – 06 pm, Tues – Sun, 27 May 2025 – 07 July 2025
Gate Gate Gallery
230/18 Pasteur, Võ Thị Sáu ward, D.3, HCMC
Free admission
Registration link

From the organizer:

The human being exists not merely as a biological entity, but as a social construct, a unit of consumption, and a fragment of data – stored, mediated, and governed. The objects we encounter daily – newspapers, advertisements, votive paper – are at once mundane and spectral: familiar artifacts layered with the residues of fading memory. Once cast out of circulation, they do not vanish but sediment – awaiting excavation as faint archaeological remains of a self-dismantling, hyper-aware culture.

In The Phantom Rite, I juxtapose industrial newsprint and technological detritus – vehicles of everyday communication – with votive paper and vernacular funerary materials traditionally linked to the spiritual realm. This convergence opens a liminal terrain: a threshold where secular materiality collides with metaphysical ritual, where memory and the present dissolve into each other. The discarded – too fragile to endure as heritage, too charged to vanish entirely – becomes my primary matter. In this state of suspension, I conjure a zone of remembrance – not to recall any fixed narrative, but to decelerate the automated mechanisms of forgetting. This work is not an act of commemoration, but a ritual of inquiry – an aesthetic practice that invokes material as witness: witness to disappearance, to occluded memory, to fractured systems of belief.

The title Huyễn Tế (幻祭) unites two ideograms: 幻 – illusion, the liminal; and 祭 – ritual, offering. It is not a religious rite, nor a theatrical reenactment of the past, but an epistemological gesture – one that reconfigures ritual form as a method to interrogate the absences embedded within material life. Though articulated in classical Sino-Vietnamese script, Huyễn Tế is not an imported abstraction. It emerges from the porous, shape-shifting syncretism of indigenous beliefs—where Buddhism, Taoism, ancestor veneration, and Vietnamese folk practices overlap, hybridize, and morph to persist within modernity.

In an age where death itself may be digitized, The Phantom Rite posits an alternative modality: one that does not seek to reproduce memory, but to make it manifest – through the residual, the forsaken, the not-yet-remembered. It is a gesture of resistance, a temporal pause, a threshold space for spectral remembrance.

Mzung Nguyễn

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