[QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY – GALLERY OF MODERN ART (QAGOMA) COLLECTION] 2018 – Ly Hoàng Ly

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Born 1975 Hanoi, Vietnam
Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Ly Hoàng Ly is a multi-disciplinary artist working across poetry, painting, video, performance and installation. She studied painting in Vietnam, later earning an MFA in sculpture through the Arts Institute of Chicago. She also works as an editor of a youth magazine. Ly’s installations often incorporate a level of performance or activation, and her work makes bodily references to women’s experiences of maternity and menstruation, as well as highlighting human emotions and our relationship to place and nature. An ongoing project since 2011 addresses the subject of immigration, drawing on her own experience as a young mother when she lived in Chicago and on Vietnam’s history of passage and dislocation. Recurring motifs of boats, houses and water allow her to express these ideas around home and movement, the fragility of memory, and the importance of community and human connection.

An abstract artwork of black, gold and silver shapes in a grid of black squares.

Ly Hoàng Ly / Vietnam b.1975 / The view 2017 / Gold leaf, silver leaf, pencil, ink, acrylic, lacquer paint on canvas / 21 parts: 76 x 76cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist


Through her multidisciplinary practice, Ly Hoàng Ly encourages us to reflect on our times. Ly’s performative and feminist practice has addressed women’s life experiences in Vietnam; however, in recent years, she has focused on more universal issues. Her current work explores the ability of humanity to adapt to division and physical displacement.

Since 2011, Ly has created numerous works under the title 0395A.ĐC. These works — artist books, sculptures, paintings, videos and installations — are concerned with the effects of travel or immigration and the consequent feelings of dislocation. Drawing on her own experience as a migrant and on the Vietnamese people’s complex history, Ly’s works feature motifs of boats, houses, water and travellers, while narratives of home and movement recur. Her artist book called boat home boat 2016 is central to this project. From inside its wooden covers, stories of migrants feature on the concertina pages — the folds refer to the fragility and the importance of human connections and memory. Ly’s ultimate aspiration is a large-scale public sculpture — based on the form of her artist book – that will provide an architectural space for shelter and social and cultural interactions in Vietnam.

Across a range of forms, Ly explores psychological displacement and self-transformation in terms of both personal and global histories.