Galerie Quynh is pleased to present Towards Realist Socialization – a solo exhibition by Ngo Dinh Bao Chau, curated by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. The show presents Ngo’s most ambitious work to date and marks the culmination of a five-year research project that examines the repetition of symbols and imagery, the intersection of public and private space, and their lasting effects on collective memory.

Towards Realist Socialization investigates how the public sphere bleeds into the private: how the concrete of monuments – and the beliefs they represent – filter into the home and manifest in our daily routines. Present in Ngo Dinh Bao Chau’s homespace, exuding an air of both familiarity and detachment, are the shadows of monuments and traces of slogans – the stowaway fragments of what otherwise exists in the public realm. Delving into the overlap between public and private spheres, her body of installation work – modelled after items of furniture – disturbs the dualism of the public 'outside' and the private 'inside'. Speaking to Gaston Bachelard’s observation in The Poetics of Space that ‘outside and inside are both intimate’, Towards Realist Socialization visualises interior and exterior worlds as intertwined and dependent spaces.

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The artworks on display are dense with detail. True to the fickle process of remembering, some details have become blurred and abstracted, while others are unknowing last-minute additions, and through endless repetition become more and more vivid. Towards Realist Socialization is a house of memories, but the materialisation of those memories reflects the present and has implications for the future. To visit the artworks in each of its rooms is as important as journeying through space and exploring what Bachelard calls ‘the hallways of the mind’ – the recesses of our psyche that Ngo Dinh Bao Chau has laid out for all to inhabit.

(Excerpt from exhibition introduction written by curatorial assistant Thai Ha)