- Symposium
Towards New Forms of Artistic Collaboration: An Experiment in Trans-Biennale
EXHIBITIONS
Installation
Venue
Nihonbashi/Bakurocho Area
Etoile Kaito Living Bldg.
1-15-15 Higashikanda, Chiyoda-ku
Date
11:30–18:00 (Fri until 19:00)
Closed on Mon and Tue
*Open Nov 3 (Nat’l hol.) and 24 (Subst. hol.).
Reference Image: Sourceless Waters: White. Shadow, 2024
Art Asian Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Image courtesy of the artist.
Nguyen Phuong Linh and Truong Que Chi have undertaken collaborative projects since 2021. Truong’s works delve into the spectacle of the everyday—its contrasting emotions and its enigmas. Nguyen’s practice contemplates form and time. Allusions to bodily movements in her recent works convey her long-standing fascination with the body, its durability, and its resilience.
BREATHE is their new collaboration, unfolding through two distinct yet interconnected bodies of work that respond to each other in material dialogue and corporeal investigation. The installation emerges like a living organism: a fabric surface printed with spongy red blocks flying and undulating; a rattan tree trunk spinning in circles as if dancing; a bicycle seat bouncing alone on a slender structure; a moving air tube striking sharply against a metal rod; and a mirror sprouting like a leaf, spinning like a carousel, reflecting a childhood photograph. A wooden goddess’s head rests on a mirrored tray, along with two old coats once belonging to their fathers.
The space operates as a mechanical body with autonomous circulation—surfaces and lines, like skin, like flesh, like veins, like hair. Heartbeat and lung rhythm, blood and air, bones and muscles. Each sculptural element contributes to a collective choreography, a meditation on a space with its own breathing pattern. Carrying the echoes of memory, the installation creates an interplay of stillness and motion, tenderness and violence, transformation and repetition, compression and release.
Support: The Japan Foundation Fellowship for Arts and Culture in Asia
Special Cooperation: Etoile Kaito & Co., Inc.
Technical Team: Nguyễn Như Bách, Nguyễn Thanh Long, Lê Quang Minh, Studio Articulate
Special thanks: Hộp Bookstore, Đỗ Thanh Lãng, Ba-bau AIR
Map
2 min walk from JR Sobu Line Bakurocho Sta. (Ex. 4)
6 min walk from Toei Shinjuku Line Bakuroyokoyama Sta. (Ex. A1)
Photo by Dat Vu & Jay Santiphap
Nguyen Phuong Linh (b. 1985) and Truong Que Chi (b. 1987) are longtime friends and colleagues. Nguyen’s practice contemplates form and time. Allusions to bodily movements in recent works convey her long-standing fascination with the body, its durability, and its resilience. As abstract renderings of social, historical, and autobiographical events and structures, Truong’s works delve into the spectacle of the everyday, its contrasting feelings, and its enigma.
Since 2021, the duo has undertaken 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 weight, height, and ephemerality. Among their shared interests are shadows of intergenerational loss and the corporeality associated with the female body in various aspects and contexts. Their works were presented at the Busan Biennale 2024 and the Asian Art Biennale 2024. They have been active as curatorial board members of Nha San Collective, an artist-run initiative in Hanoi, Vietnam since 2013.
Nihonbashi/Bakurocho Area
Etoile Kaito Living Bldg.