poems of the sky – an open studio by Ly Hoàng Ly

• Duration: 20.09.2023 – 02.12.2023
• Opening hours: Tues-Sun, 10am – 6pm
• Location: Sàn Art, Millennium Masteri, B6.17 & B6.16, 132 Ben Van Don, W.6, D.4, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (enter via Nguyen Huu Hao)
• Studio opened by appointments only

Exhibition booklet here

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.”― Kahlil Gibran

Ly Hoàng Ly and Sàn Art heartily invite you to an open studio whose title draws inspiration from a poem of Gibran in “Sand and Foam” to explore the artist’s partially unfinished, partially fulfilled space of imagination. Originating from the performance “Hugging trees – Hugging your loved ones – Hugging yourself” at the Plum Village, France in 2015, Ly Hoàng Ly carries on exploring the relations among different bodies as artistic material and the dynamic between internal drives and external forces.

As an artist adept in various materials, transformations of the external world, and micro changes in the inner soul, in this open studio, Ly presents her artwork-in-progress as a lingering meditation practice since 2018. Coming here, the audience is asked to observe, and then interrogate the static and dynamic in performance art, the individuality and collectivity in public art, and the formation, participation, and contribution of factors that seem random and trivial, yet carefully calculated: time, location, body, audience – to position the artist’s presence in her work. Coming here, the audience is invited for a conceptual dialogue to explore the possibilities of different utilisations of the interior and exterior space of the artworks; the materials and their effects on our sensation. Thus, the artist and the audience together reflect and challenge, abolish and consolidate, forgetting and searching … to figure out these connections between humans with natural beings, between our inner self with the beauty, ugliness, and inbetweenness of the surrounding world.