Lessons from the Margins: Notes by a Foreign Gallerist in Paris
Lê Thiên Bảo at Galerie Bao, 49 avenue Parmentier, 75011 Paris, 2025. Photo: Viet Cuong Hoang, makeup: Yinn Hoang
12 Dec 2025, by Lê Thiên Bảo
Fostering identity, visibility, community through Galerie BAO.
My Own Words is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
Someone once said that migration is a rebirth. Moving to a new country means learning to speak again, misinterpreting signs, and navigating an unfamiliar landscape. When I arrived in Paris in September 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, on a France Excellence Eiffel scholarship, I completed 80 percent of my Master's degree on a computer screen and barely knew a soul.I felt going into fashion illustration was a good compromise, as I could easily obtain a more commercial line of work after university while doing what I love, painting figurative works.
Opening a gallery in Paris has been a journey of unlearning and relearning. It demands patience, adaptability, and an unshakable belief in the value of one's work. Simone de Beauvoir once said: "L’expérience, c’est le nom que chacun donne à ses erreurs," or “experience is the name we give to our mistakes”. Mistakes remain bitter memories unless we brutally question them. To transform mistakes into lessons, I have noted down fragments of my own soliloquy as a small-scale gallerist of a Vietnamese-founded gallery that operates in Paris, and is dedicated to introducing artists from Southeast Asia.
Must a contemporary gallery in Paris be located in the Marais to gain visibility?
I do not deny the importance of a prestigious address or the proximity to established names. But remember: the true measure of a gallery's reputation is not its postal code but the pulse within its walls. A good gallery, in my humble opinion, is one that can defend its artists’ careers and foster meaningful connections with serious collectors who share the same values.
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