Summer Breeze
Phuong Linh Nguyen
Truong Que Chi
Gabby Miller
5 July - 31 August 2025

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The works of Phuong Linh Nguyen move through time, memories, bodies, and landscapes. In her practice, memory is not fixed yet being in a state of flux. It flickers, fades, and often takes shape with fragile materials and physical gestures.

Qi (2025) is a new installation titled after the Chinese word for life force or breath. It features a tube resemblances of medical IV tube, an air compressor, and a vertical metal needle, suggesting both the body’s internal systems and machines that help sustain life. The work draws on personal experiences involving Nguyen’s son, as well as her family’s history.

During the American War, her grandfather mentored her father to become a writer through their correspondence. Her father buried all the letters, addressed to his father, under a mangrove tree in Quang Tri. The letters were never found. Years later, he suffered a spinal injury and required metal supports in his back. The image of metal held upright, resembling a medical needle, an upright spine, and a pen, became a quiet symbol of resilience and inherited knowledge. The memory of Typhoon Yagil, seen from her home along the Red River, and the breathlessness of asthma, a hereditary illness affecting those close to her, are conveyed through programmed compressed air.

Qi is shown alongside Peeling (2019), a video by Truong. Its circular imagery, resembling holes, is inspired by the camera obscura, a motif that recurs throughout several works by Truong and Nguyen, especially The Encounter (2021). Through the repeated action of peeling a potato in the circular projected reflection, the video reflects on time and how the potato spins slowly in the hands of the peeler, like the motion of a rotating moon or planet.

The Encounter (2021) is a video installation composed of a trilogy of videos: The Head, The Landscape, and The Encounter. It is set in the Red River Delta, particularly in Nam Dinh, a place that holds both personal and cultural significance for Nguyen. This is where she accompanied her father on restoration trips at the age of 8 or 9. Nguyen collaborated with Truong Que Chi on the project, and recurring motifs such as circular imagery and holes appear throughout their works. The videos weave together layered images. In one, a head appears trapped among the modern buildings of Saigon. This scene draws from a story in the Mother Goddess tradition, in which a princess is beheaded by her father for loving an enemy. Her spirit remains revered at Mother Goddess temples.

The Tongue (2021) transforms landscape into body. The work is based on photographs Nguyen took of salt fields in Nam Dinh in 2009. Later when she returned there in 2020, the fields were empty, and the farmers had left. In response, she altered the soil’s colour to pink, printed it on PVC resembling skin, and cut it into the shape of a large tongue hanging in the body of the space. The resulting sculpture suggests both emergence and disappearance, where earth becomes tongue and image becomes its skin.

Candies for Thu Ha (2012) features small candies, made from sugar and lime juice, scattered across the floor. The work, a quiet gesture, is dedicated to Thu Ha, a Vietnamese friend Nguyen met in 2012 in the United States. Thu Ha shared a story about her mother’s homemade candies, which she kept in a bag during her journey fleeing from Vietnam to the United States. It was something that reminded her of her mother. With only a rough idea of the ingredients drawn from faded memory, Nguyen attempted to recreate them. The candies reflect memory as something brief and easily lost. The work is a fleeting gesture, frozen for a moment before it fades.

Gabby Miller’s videos capture short, intimate gestures. In Resting (2020), she lies beside her lover, listening to music. These moments appear throughout her practice, expressing her interest in horizon lines, crossing over, and being in between. In Peephole (2018), Miller performs acrobatic movements against an empty void. The camera moves in and out, shifting perspective like peering through a peephole.

In Nguyen’s video Walk (2023), Miller is one of the main performers. The video was inspired by an American veteran of the American War who, due to a medical condition, walks daily to maintain his health. While walking in a city park, he often collects stray golf balls.

In Nguyen’s work, the body becomes a vessel of landscapes, memories, absences, and returns. Rather than telling a single story, her works remain open and fragmented, resisting closure in favour of subjective readings.

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about the artist:

Nguyen Phuong Linh (1985) and Truong Que Chi (1987) are longtime friends and colleagues. Spanning video, installation and sculpture, Phuong Linh's practice contemplates form and time. Her works attempt to navigate geographical and cultural shifts as she traces ambiguous fragments of personal and collective histories in Vietnam. Allusions to bodily movements in recent works convey her long standing fascination with the body, its durability, its resilience. Quế Chi traverses the borders of different terrains including moving image, sculptural installation, and performing arts, while remaining attentive to proportion, materials, rhythm and temporality. Her works delve into the spectacle of the everyday, its contrasting feeling and enigmas. Beside individual pursuits, from 2021 onwards, the Hanoi-based duo also realizes collaborative projects as echoes of the synchronous rhythms of their lives that mirror one another. Their works, in juxtaposition, converse and conjure up a visceral sense of weights, heights, and ephemerality hidden beneath architectural structures and social communities. Among their shared interests are shadows of intergenerational loss and the corporeality associated with the female body in various aspects and contexts. They have been active as curatorial board members of Nha San Collective, an artist-run initiative in Hanoi, Vietnam since 2013.

Phuong Linh Nguyen was born and raised in Nha San Studio --based in her father’s home, it’s considered one of the longest established non-profit artist-run spaces in Hanoi. In 2013, she co-founded and since then has been co-directing Nha San Collective with her close artist friends. Together, they participated in Documenta 15 curated by Ruangrupa in 2022. Phuong Linh’s works have been featured in various local and international exhibitions, including Busan Biennale and Asian Art Biennale 2024, Listening to the Overtones of Fissures at National Human Right Museum Taipei 2023, Asian Pacific Triennial 2021, the Singapore Biennale, Kuandu Biennale Taipei, Shanghai Biennale in 2016, HIWAR Darat AL Funnun Jordan 2014. She won the Hans Nefkens Foundation-BACC Award for Contemporary Video Art and The Pollock Krasner prize in 2017.

Truong Que Chi is an M.A. graduate of Film Studies from the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, active in both the visual art and cinema scene as a filmmaker, an artist and a curator. Her practice examines the spectacle of everyday violence in Vietnam and delves into the complex relationship between archive, memory and imagination. Her works have been featured at various local and international film festivals, exhibitions, and symposiums, including ‘Asian Film Focus 2017: Time Machine’, Objectifs–Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore; ‘Skylines with Flying People 3’, Nhà Sàn Collective, Vietnam (2015-2017); ‘South by Southeast. A Further Surface’, Times Museum, China (2016); ‘Oberhausen International Film Festival’, Germany (2015); ‘Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid’, Gaité Lyrique, Paris, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015); and ‘Torino Film Festival’, Italy (2014).

Gabby Miller is an artist from the Bay Area who has lived and worked extensively in Hanoi, Vietnam where she has organized projects with Nha San Collective and The Queer Forever Festival. She has made work for the Artesterium project in Tbilisi, Georgia, co-organized the IN:ACT Performance Art Symposium in Hanoi, and exhibited at The Luggage Store, Museum of Capitalism, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SoMarts, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Boston Center for the Arts, and Random Parts Gallery. Gabby is also an educator and youth worker, having worked with groups including Oxbow School in Napa, Bay Area Girls Rock Camp, and the San Francisco Friends School. She serves on the board of Dhamma Dena Meditation Center, a vipassana retreat center dedicated to supporting the practice of BIPOC & Queer communities. 
 

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Poster design: Theetat Thunkijjanukij

Installation: Paraform Studio

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