Hà My Nguyễn, Pavé N°1 from Under My Skin series, details, 2026, ceramic. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Bao
At first glance, Hà My Nguyễn’s ceramic sculptures invite our focus to what tears through the fragile ceramic skin, bursting outward toward us: thorns, vines, fruits, seeds or tumors. As we linger, our gaze gradually follows them down to their roots, weaving through the cuts and delving deep beneath the ceramic surface. This shift in perspective amusingly implies both a sense of physical intimacy and a clinical observation. What is inside, and beneath, that skin? It is perhaps a murky space, at times dense, at other times shimmering with the artist’s nostalgia. It is perhaps a reservoir of fertility and expectation fraught with care and anxiety; or a sac of fluid from festering wounds that induce shivering, burning fevers.
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It is also time, accumulated over countless days, encasing that fluid space of pains and memories. And, what occurs within unfolds as what manifests on the outside: the throbbing, the rising and falling, the wrinkling of the skin signify the struggle to adapt, the resistance against internal pain, and the plastic flexibility of this fragile surface. Naturally, everything could just remain shrouded, concealed within and beneath; and life goes on, indifferent yet normal, as it always has. One who carries a tumor or a sac of liquid, carries it through every step, every place, every romance and separation. The growing tumor and daily life exist as two separate entities, avoiding one another. Yet, the weight of time and the aging of flesh and memory make it increasingly intractable to ignore the trauma stored within the body. Pain has finally become daily life. Guided by an intuition of time and physical sensitivity, Hà My cuts into the skin, opens it, allowing what is inside to erupt, releasing the pent-up longings. Hà My opens, not from the outside, but from within and beneath the skin: as if she were diving in the dark, slicing the water’s surface from below.
In this movement from the inside out, from the depths to the surface, that which was once hidden undergoes a metamorphosis into familiar things of the artist's memory. The thorns seem like things that wound the flesh; yet they belong to the familiar bồ kết : the thorns are brewed into a tea to soothe inflammation and dissipate festering swellings, while the seeds are used as a traditional wash to darken the hair…
… In those distant days in a small frontier town, where summer days were torched not just by the red sun but also the reckless Lao wind sweeping through barren hills, and the rest of the year was molded by falling rains that whispered of a lost past, like mumblings of a mad poet born in the same region: "The rain drips drops on my head / I ask the Heavens to partake in my grief / In the wild days of roaming childhood / Falling rain was a joy that made me whole / Now where that old happiness has fled / What remains is a life colored half-shred / Reveries fall in seeds, strand by strand / ”*
There, sheltering from rain and wind, the women of a family would boil bồ kết seeds to extract an ink-black liquid for their hair. The scent and color of that dark water seeped, forever, into every sliver of hair.
A sense of a memory-scape poignantly weaves through Hà My’s work. If we try to step back to grasp in a distance the abstraction of the pieces, what appears before us are the undulating forms as if of topographical maps of one or many landscapes. The openings of the earth's surface are to see through the distance, so that here might see there. But what is seen is hardly everything, for the space beneath is always an accumulation of de-stilling time. Like pains, like memories. Like skin, like earth.
* From the poem “Trời Mưa trên Đầu” (The Rain on My Head) by Bùi Giáng (1926-1998)
Featured artist
Hà My Nguyễn
