Ly Hoàng Ly (born in Hanoi, now based in Hochiminh City) is a multidisciplinary artist working across poetry, painting, video, performance art, installation and public art. Ly graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 1999, received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011 and earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), majoring in Sculpture in 2013. She spent a year from 2013 to 2014 interning at the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (JFABC, SAIC). She also works as a book editor of Youth Publishing House in Ho Chi Minh City since 2000. Ly is the first woman visual artist in Vietnam doing performance art and poetry performance. Her installations incorporate a level of performance or activation between subjects and objects that unlock sensual affects in the human-materiality
nexus.

Ly's previous works make bodily references to women's cultural experiences of maternity and ministrations as well as highlight human emotions and our relationship to place and nature. Since 2011, Ly has explored the relationship of freedom and surveillance, inherited trauma, the ephemeral materiality of memory, the dislocation and the importance of community and human connection, the association of the loss of nature and human mortality. Her art raises questions about the general human conditions, the critical states of society, and our shared issues of migration and immigration. It speaks not only on a personal level, but also on a global scale: of (mis)understandings and (mis)placement, of (trans)forming identity and being rootless, of adaptation and acceptance, of division and union, and of being human.

Text by VCAD based on information from the website Sàn Art.