Solo exhibition «Traces of the Times» by Chau Nguyen

   Some histories are carried through objects as much as they are through words. In a gallery in Bình Thạnh, familiar objects return in unexpected forms: richly textured surfaces sit alongside digitally transformed shapes, and both ask you to look under the surface rather than at it.

   Chau Nguyen draws on visual traditions that have long shaped cultural and spiritual life across Vietnam and Asia. Buddhist iconography, Đạo Mẫu mother-goddess worship and architectural motifs become recurring elements in a painterly language that moves between historical reference and contemporary inquiry.

   What repays attention here:

• — how identity, gender and cultural memory sit embedded inside visual culture
• — the relationship between image, surface and meaning, which unfolds gradually rather than announcing itself
• — the sheer material thickness of the paintings, which rewards sustained looking

   Chau Nguyen was born in Hanoi in 1994 and is a Vietnamese American conceptual artist based in Philadelphia. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work has been shown at the National Liberty Museum, Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Temple Contemporary, the Vincom Center for Contemporary Art in Vietnam and Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Sweden. She has held residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Millay Arts, the Wassaic Project and Byrdcliffe, and received fellowships and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation among others.

   Go if you are interested in art from the Vietnamese diaspora, and in what happens when a painter examines her home heritage from half a world away. Bình Thạnh is a short ride north of District 1.

   Look closely at the surface and you start to see what lies under it.