For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Bao in Paris, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn (b. 1993, Hanoi) poses an artistic inquiry into culture, diaspora, and entertainment. Thủy Tiên, who lives and works between Hanoi and Frankfurt am Main, recontextualises the legendary entertainment broadcast Paris By Night*, continuing a kinetic examination of stagecraft and memory.
“Paris - kinh đô của ánh sáng muôn màu, của những tình thơ diễm ảo, nơi hò hẹn của tài tử giai nhân. Khi màn đêm buông xuống, Paris bừng sống dậy trong tiếng nhạc, lời ca.” (Paris—the city of light, a place of enchanting romance and a rendezvous for the talented and the beautiful. As night falls, the city comes alive with the sound of music and song). Mạnh Đạt Hà. (2017, December 7). Paris By Night 01 - The first ever episode released in 1983.
Continuing her interrogations of sculpture, Thủy Tiên features a series of glass monuments on motorised displays. In this new body of work, she delves into the broadcast's first 21 episodes. The lack of clear documentation during this period of filming offers a mythological aspect of its backstage architecture and lighting mechanics, allowing Thủy Tiên to manifest a profound meditation on legibility, exile, and the continuous mechanical loop of history.
Suspended between stillness and motion, the exhibition reanimates fragments of a shared cultural memory.
(*) More than a television programme, Paris By Night occupied a singular position within Vietnamese cultural history. For overseas Vietnamese communities, it functioned as a repository of memory, preserving musical repertoires, visual aesthetics, and cultural expressions that disappeared from public life in Vietnam after 1975. Paris By Night offered a rare glimpse beyond national borders — a shared audiovisual space connecting audiences separated by geography, politics, and historical experience.
Photos : © Amandine Lemaire — heing photography
Photos : © Amandine Lemaire — heing photography
