For EXPO CHICAGO, Galerie Quynh presents the first solo show in the United States of work by Vy Trịnh (b. 1996, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). Expanding on the artist's first major solo exhibition ON DA DREAM (2024), the new sculptures and prints impart visual and textural cues to trace the life cycles of commercial goods, material ecologies and local economies.
Trịnh was born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) where she views the chaotic streets not just as pass-throughs but as a living environment that borrows and morphs, making methodologies, and sculpture itself through the bundling and stacking of commodities that spill out of shop fronts to flood pavements. Reappropriating highly manufactured objects and media as raw materials, Trịnh grinds, bends, wraps, ties, burnishes, and adds bling. Metal, ribbons, and bead chains are grounded - balancing directly on the floor - and yet buzz with potential movement. Moving goods, objects, and motors melt into the large and elusive material-semiotic environment.
An ode to Vietnam's city dwellers, manual workers, and mass-produced automotive objects that inhabit the streets together in a blur of movement, Trịnh's works are always "becoming", following the traffic of objects, different forms of gendered labour and agency, and the sites where these categories are constantly being negotiated and improvised.
