“When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019)

Text and curation by Sarah Le Quang Sang

Marking 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Only Your Name is a group exhibition featuring new and recent work by artists of Vietnamese descent Hoa Dung Clerget, Vicky Đỗand Duong Thuy Nguyen. The exhibition follows the journey of Vietnamese people migrating to the UK from 1975 onwards, preserving history through a Vietnamese lens and reflecting on the contemporary diaspora. Presented by SLQS Gallery in Shoreditch, the exhibition is situated close to Hackney’s Kingsland Road, also known as the ‘Pho Mile’, where many Vietnamese families settled from the late 1970s. A video essay by Vicky Đỗ revisits the history of Vietnamese refugees arriving in Hong Kong. Duong Thuy Nguyen’s embossed aluminium and wax sculptures reinterpret Joan Wakelin’s 1989–90 photographs of Vietnamese refugees held in Hong Kong detention centres (featured  in the V&A Collection). Hoa Dung Clerget presents installations and sculptural works that consider the labour and lives of immigrant women and the Nail Art subculture, distorting stereotypical and fetishised portrayals of Asian women.

at Harlesden High Street

Group Show: Tươi Sống

Artists:
Anh-Phuong (AP) Nguyen
Hoa Dung Clerget
Minh Lan Tran
Special performance by Trâm Nguyễn (vinacringe)

The exhibition brings together four artists from the Vietnamese diaspora, based between London and Paris. Using the metaphor of aquariums found in Vietnamese seafood restaurants, the artists immersed themselves in the fishbowl that is the confined space of the gallery, to explore themes of identity and of the simulacrum.

These aquariums found in restaurants in Europe or America, emblematic of popular restaurants, often feature colour-saturated miniatures depicting typically Vietnamese landscapes such as mountains and pagodas. These elements of traditional culture permeate even packaging of Vietnamese products, thus adopting a pop dimension.

The artists are both fascinated and troubled by this excessive proliferation of pop culture, both in Vietnam and in the contemporary diaspora. The exhibition, steeped in artifice and simulacra, delves into the capitalist evasion spirit of this kitsch imagery. The viewer feels trapped, « fish-tanked », their gaze caught between voyeuristic curiosity and a sense of wonder.

Text by Louis Chapple

Studio/chapple is delighted to present Durian Revolution, the first solo exhibition by Hoa Dung Clerget.

Clerget’s practice is centred on the artisanal production of objects that take on a narrative dimension on

the themes of the domestic and displacement. Her works affirm their materiality through gestures

borrowed from everyday life, the ones of the women in her family and community.

For Durian Revolution, Clerget has staged a reimagining of the nail salon, where only fluids and odours -

both toxic and attractive - remain. Taking inspiration from the durian fruit, hyperbolic in its soft flesh

and spiked shell, exterior beauty and fetid stench, Durian Revolution features a new series of threedimensional

paintings made with the techniques and materials of Nail Art.

The defensive odour of the durian, from which these paintings derive their title, becomes a distant

reference; a sensation evoked by metonymy and substitution. Instead, it is replaced by the toxic smells of

acetone and chemical acrylic that the artist has been exposed to for several months.

By projecting the fruit onto the canvas, Clerget reverses its status as food and pays homage to its cultural

heritage. She uses nail polish as a ready-made, and recent nail art techniques as a painting process, thus

amalgamating the categories of nail art and art, subculture and ‘high’ culture.

Fluid and ephemeral, ‘Narcomorphous’ acts as a writhing installation around which the series of paintings

orbit. Taking inspiration from the Quynh Flower (Queen of the Night) that blooms for one night a year, the

installation erupts and retreats across the gallery floor, its gestural unpredictability indicative of its own

making process.

Durian Revolution unites two sensory shields of armour through an investigation into the toxicity of

beauty, women’s labour, and the nail salon as instigator of social transgression, imagination and

transformation within diasporic communities.