The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

107 ARTISTS Top: Ashes (detail) 2013 Cow bone, iron, ceramic, wood, canvas / 21 parts: 9 x 28 x 28cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist Below: The view (detail) 2017 Gold leaf, silver leaf, pencil, ink, acrylic, lacquer paint on canvas / 21 parts: 76 x 76cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist ly hoÀng ly Born 1975, Hanoi, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Ly Hoàng Ly’s multidisciplinary practice asks us to reflect on our social psyche. With a background in feminist performance and poetry, her visual practice also possesses an underlying narrative sensitivity, and this is present in her current work that addresses the ability of humanity to adapt to division and physical displacement. Since 2011, Ly has created video, objects, paintings, photographs and installations around the effects of travel and immigration, and the consequent experience of dislocation. Under the title 0395A.ĐC — part of a number belonging to a Vietnamese refugee boat — these works emanate from the artist’s experiences and memories. 1 Connecting with the long history of human movement, Ly’s works explore the subjective consequences for individuals, who, for whatever reason, must leave the place where they once felt whole. Ashes 2013, part of the selection of works from 0395A.ĐC included in APT9, explores Ly’s self-analysis of identity, and how it manifests away from Vietnam. Living in the United States for five years, she had to find ways to cook traditional meals for her daughter to recreate some of the familiar sensations of home. Her performance piece Phð 2011–13 involved religiously washing and cooking cow bones, and simmering them with other ingredients to replicate traditional flavours. The related work Ashes was Ly’s attempt to fill the cooked bones with iron to create replicas, a project doomed to failure as the substances collapsed into one another. For Ly, the resulting fragmented forms hold a psychological sense of longing and belonging: Right here is my country — the very thing I can hold; right here is my tradition — the very thing I can keep . . . As migrants and immigrants, we have to absorb new identities and cultural knowledge; at the same time, we also bring our own traditions and skills from one home to another. This journey, however, is tough, broken, futile. And through this toughness, even our most basic biological elements — like bones — change and take on new forms. 2 The paintings in The view 2017 offer a different perspective of journeying, one connected to alchemy and transformation, of life as well as matter. A little like a game of Chinese whispers, the objects from Ashes are enlarged, recalling images of mineral samples or plant cells. The paintings also resemble historical atlases, as accompanying charcoal-and-ink drawings of travelling figures suggest mythological journeys, as well as recent tales of world migrations, magnifying the personal to the level of metaphor. Together, Ashes and The view subtly expose the ruptures and divisions that have accompanied migration across time. In such works, Ly picks up on the psychological self-transformation that is often at the core of significant personal experiences. A number of other works from 0395A.ĐC are titled boat home boat and take a sculptural form: the shape of a house at one end and the shape of a boat at the other. boat home boat 2016 is derived from the 2012 artist book of the same name, a concertina length of paper that opens into leaves resembling waves. Scattered on these pages — as if tossed around at sea — are words describing journeys of loss (of home and loved ones), fear (of death and the unknown) and dislocation (of identity and roots). Ly Hoàng Ly’s works draw on the emotions of the new arrival, the resistance of the displaced, and the significance of memory to those far from home. Her subtle gestures of violence and repair offer a new beauty and inspiration for the contemplation of ideas that otherwise go unspoken. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 Ly’s ambitions for 0395A.ĐC include a permanent large-scale version of boat home boat 2017, a 7x7x4-metre steel structure that offers a space for creating community through activation. Ly’s plans are to locate the sculpture in a public space and it would arguably be the first contemporary public artwork in Vietnam not instituted by the government. boat home boat was included in Ly’s solo exhibition at The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City in 2017, where it was activated by dancers, musicians, speakers and members of the audience. 2 0395A.ĐC: A Solo Exhibition by Ly Hoàng Ly [exhibition catalogue], The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2017.