BIOGRAPHY / THÔNG TIN NGHỆ SỸ
Ly Hoàng Ly
Ly Hoang Ly is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist working between Ho Chi Minh City and Chicago.
Her practice spans sculpture, installation, public art, painting, drawing, performance, video, artist’s books, and poetry.
Working through long durations and material processes, her projects unfold as ongoing structures: gestures extended over time, materials that are held, and situations that draw collective presence into relation. Rather than producing single, self-contained objects, she develops works that move across time, sites, and forms, simultaneously unfolding through intersecting temporalities, materials, and lived encounters. She is particularly interested in working through site-specific conditions. The body, in this practice, exists beyond the framed environment – encountering, holding, absorbing new layers, and continuously being transformed.
Ly Hoang Ly is recognized as the first woman visual artist in Vietnam to work with performance art and poetry performance. Alongside her visual practice, she maintains a longstanding engagement with poetry and language, and has worked as a book editor in Ho Chi Minh City since 2000. Her poetry has been translated into multiple languages, and has received major national awards in Vietnam.
Her practice has been shaped through long-standing engagements with key contemporary art spaces in Vietnam, including Blue Space Contemporary Art Center (since 2000), among the earliest independent contemporary art spaces in Ho Chi Minh City, alongside Sàn Art, and Manzi Art Space.
Within her practice, two long-term projects form central trajectories. Trees: Natural Cultural Heritage (2015–present) began with an act of embracing living trees and continues through different material and temporal forms, including the long-term keeping of what remains.
0395A.ĐC (2011–present), including the large-scale public sculpture “boat-home-boat”, approaches displacement, [im]-migration, and dwelling through a structure that can be entered, inhabited, and reconfigured as a shared space.
Alongside these, other ongoing projects such as “Prvdens Vivo Prvdens Morior – Mindful Living Mindful Dying” and “Honey Honey Honey or the Fragments of Trust” continue to unfold across contexts, shifting readings, and ecological and socio-political ruptures, as well as the exploration of the limits of endurance and duration, forming an expanding constellation of projects. She imagines these ongoing projects as different kinds of trees, structured like a panopticon – a shifting field of visibility and relation where each project remains aware of others within a shared yet decentralized space. Each project can be understood as a tree with branching and rooting extensions, intertwining and intersecting with others – sometimes at the edges, sometimes across shared or shifting spaces – forming an evolving and interconnected field of relations, where roots extend through time.
Her work has taken shape across Vietnam and internationally through exhibitions, public contexts, and collaborative platforms, including the Busan Biennale (2002), the Nippon International Performance Art Festival (2001–2003), the exhibition ‘Mở Cửa – Open Door – Vietnam’s Fine-Arts during 30 years of Renewal” (Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts, 2016), The Factory Contemporary Art Centre (2017) and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018), as well as presentations at institutions such as Chiang Mai University Art Museum, the National Gallery in Bangkok, the Dahlem Museum (Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art), Berlin, and Saatchi Gallery, London. She was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a highly selective residency supported by the U.S. Department of State.
Her work are held in public and private collections, including M+, Hong Kong; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Australia; San Francisco Asian Art Museum; Museo de Antioquia, Colombia; Kamel Lazaar Foundation; and Nguyen Art Foundation.
Ly Hoang Ly received her BFA in Painting from Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts and her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Fulbright scholar.