Hằng Hằng | The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower
Hằng Hằng, La Raison Est Un Chien. La Raison Est Une Fleur., vue de détail d’exposition, Galerie Bao, Paris, 2025. Photo: Nancy Karam, courtesy de Galerie Bao.
Here is an excerpt from the exhibition essay written by Stéphane Degoutin for The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower (2025). It is Hằng Hằng’s first solo show at Galerie Bao, Paris.
Hằng Hằng calls her installation a “garden”. The word feels familiar, reassuring, but nothing here resembles a place of greenery or rest. The gallery is immersed in an intense saturated chroma-blue, the very same blue once used for video backdrops. One feels that everything here could be erased, replaced, rewritten.
Even the air carries an imprint. It is infused with a scent that recreates petrichor, the characteristic smell of wet earth rising when rain falls on dry soil. Hằng Hằng composed it with the help of International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF).
Shimmering fragments with a metallic sheen are suspended within this monochrome field, while on a screen, a house in Vietnam collapses under the force of machines. Two histories unfold in parallel yet never converge.
When first presented in 2023 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), the installation Bố không biết mình đang ở đâu (I [the father] don’t know where I am) (2023) featured three performers dressed in blue reciting a poem in turn, each in a different language: Vietnamese, English, French. The text unfolded but the meaning of the words slipped away in fragments, leaving the audience suspended in the fissure between languages, experiencing the untranslatable. From a suitcase, the artist drew drawings, books, photographs. Nothing resembling a demonstration, a narrative, let alone an explanation. The gesture evoked instead an opening, an offering, an intimate sharing. In that moment, it became clear that this garden was not a backdrop but a place where one opens to memory, to silence, to forms that refuse explanation.
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