“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
Richie Nath, Passport Photo - Zwe Htet, 2026, colored pencil, gouache and watercolour on Arches® Aquarelle paper, 100% cotton, 300gsm, acid-free. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Bao.
Richie Nath was born twice: once in Yangon, and again in Paris. Since leaving Myanmar in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, he has come to understand what it means to both produce and undo himself. The displacement opened a distance from his mother, one he had not known before, though her presence continues to structure his sense of self.
As the emotional and hierarchical order between mother and son began to fracture, the possibility of self-recognition emerged. His first self-portrait Where Are You?, painted in 2023, does not resolve this rupture but marks its beginning. In the exhibition An Oyster Without a Pearl, this movement unfolds across three axes: family, migration, identity.
With Mother Stands for Comfort (2026), the artist returns to the maternal figure. The work recalls Saturn Devouring His Son (1820-1823) by Francisco Goya, yet its violence is not mythological. It is intimate. Drawing on religious imagery of motherhood, the painting navigates a relationship shaped by care and control, devotion and injury. It is also an attempt at recognition, of what was given, and of what remains. Maternal love appears here as both protective and consuming, a force that sustains while eroding the boundaries it once produced.
If family marks the site where the self begins to take form, migration unsettles that formation. In Paris-site (parasite), drawing from Primavera (1470s or early 1480s) by Sandro Botticelli, Richie Nath enters a different symbolic order, that of the West, of freedom, of futurity. The work is read from right to left, reversing narrative expectation. On the right, the artist appears in doubled form, one figure carried away by Zephyr while reaching toward a projected self that may never materialise. At the centre, Marianne/Venus stand as figures of promise. On the left, within what resembles a celebratory scene, the artist remains at the edge. He does not fully enter. Migration does not resolve but extends a state of suspension.
If Mother Stands for Comfort points to the impossibility of leaving origin, and Paris-site (parasite) to the impossibility of belonging, Passport Photo – Zwe Htet (2026) reduces identity to its limit. Zwe Htet is the artist’s legal name, yet the passport image is fictional. The work states a simple fact: the artist has no nationality. As a refugee, he exists outside formal systems of identification.
“Being a refugee, a creature in purgatory. I am but a spectre that does not belong anywhere. I live in my own imagination, desires, and fantasy; and it is there I construct my own passport, a thing that does not exist…”
- Richie Nath
Throughout the exhibition, the artist’s portrait recurs as a form of inhabitation. It does not stabilise identity but tests its limits. He appears as if he has lived through more than one life. In each work, he is both the one who looks and the one being seen. Both figure and narrator. The self does not settle. It shifts, it repeats, it slips away.
An Oyster Without a Pearl marks his first solo exhibition in Paris, the place that has held him for the past five years. He does not look for resolution. He remains inside a process that does not complete itself. No pearl is formed. And yet, in that absence, life persists. Like an oyster that has held onto a grain of sand for too long, until it forgets how it began, Richie Nath stays within an ongoing state of becoming.
Text by Lê Thiên-Bảo
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