Installation of 36/40 pieces woodblock print, monoprint, stamping, stencil, acrylic, glitter, imitation gold leaf on cardboard. 

Description

Huế – and Ho Chi Minh City-based artist Ngô Đình Bảo Châu has worked in a wide range of materials and techniques. In her wallpaper series, she uses motifs and objects from public life, referencing Vietnamese history and personal memory, and recreating the discontinuous and incomplete practice of remembering. The works evoke a nostalgia for things, events, and images that the artist has experienced but which are now someone else’s present and will be yet someone else’s future. Here we encounter măng non, a standardized symbol of the Ho Chi Minh Young Pioneer Organization, multiplied and arranged like a six-petal flower, hidden under smaller white floral motifs. The multitude of swirling flowers obscures the symbol and its original signifiers. These works combine images of chain-link fence, flowers, burning fires, shadows of monuments, and of a schoolboy saluting the flag. By turning public space into decorative wallpaper – a symbol of private space that is paradoxically shared in the public space of a museum – the artist adds a layer of reflection over the practice of everyday life.

Description from "Vietnam in Transition, 1976–Present" Exhibition Catalog, 2023, p.28.