Vo Tran Chau

Woven into Vo Tran Chau's practice is the intrinsic emotionality of found fabrics and used clothes, retaining within them ambiguous, yet still pertinent histories. The act of threading together her squares of textile is as though a reconstruction of the stories lost in grand narratives. In her earlier works, Vo Tran Chau navigates various sites with cultural or personal significance, subjecting them to a pixelation that draws attention to the murky waters of history. The images, blurred from view, evade our attempts to see and point to the very nature of memory: hazy, and at times wilfully amnesic. In more recent works, the artist continues to explore the act of remembering, this time with those whose histories overlap her own. Her encounters with Jeju Island - its textile techniques, the personal stories, and the religious practice of Muism - inform her spiritually-charged works, asking further questions of life and death and reincarnation. Through her method of image making, Vo Tran Chau recognises the depth of historical wounds passed down the generations, and stitches them back as a way to heal. 

 

Vo Tran Chau (b. 1986, Binh Thuan) graduated from the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts in 2011, and has since held prestigious exhibitions within the region and abroad. Selected shows include Lunar Breccia, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City; Leaf picking in the ancient forest, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City; Where The Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Unfolding: Fabric of Our Life, Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT), Hong Kong; Lingering at the Peculiar Pavilion, Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, travelled to Salon Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City; The Foliage, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA), Hanoi; Suzhou Documents, curated by Zhang Qing and Roger M. Buergel, Suzhou Art Museum, Suzhou, China; Still (the) Barbarians, curated by Koyo Kouoh, EVA International: Ireland's Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick, Ireland; Tracing, Born from the Land, and My Sister, San Art, Ho Chi Minh City; Black Fog, Nha San Collective, Hanoi; Petit and Smooth, Nha San Studio, Hanoi; and Bolero, Zero Station, Ho Chi Minh City.

 

In 2015, Vo Tran Chau undertook San Art Laboratory, an arts residency initiated by San Art. She received a grant from the Danish Vietnamese Cultural Development and Exchange Fund in 2011 for the exhibition Born from the Land. 

 

Vo Tran Chau lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.