My-Lan Hoang-Thuy: Belle Orchidée, Pissenlit Passable

In Vietnamese, the artist’s first name means “beautiful orchid”. Not bad. Better than “adequate dandelion”.

The Vietnamese language does not really have definite articles (the) or indefinite articles (a/an). Family members are named according to their relationship to the other members. A son is named in relation to his mother; a niece, in relation to her aunt. In the family history, these identity markers woven into our names are an incessant reminder that we are nothing more than our parents’ children.

From one culture to another, language is the keeper of definitions. From one generation to the next, it spins tales, reminds us of quarrels, recites poetry, and sometimes prevents us from telling our own story within a greater collective family history.

To define her work and tell her own story, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy speaks in precise terms, choosing her words with great care. Her series are moods; her works, objects. Here, acrylic paint is both the form and content of the work; paint is the subject and the object of the object. The paintings shown here, paint-objects and painted-objects, are made of solidified drips of acrylic paint on which the artist prints images, motifs, and souvenirs of her sometimes-trying personal history.

Within a different history, that of art, it is the late 19th century that fascinates the artist. It was the century that claimed to portray reality, and then dispose of it, and then in its final years, saw Gauguin promise truth in painting. While pigment settles and paint dries, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy’s objects each speak a truth: that of the present, fluid and subjective.

Born in 1990, and a graduate of l’Ecole Nationale Sup rieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy lives and works in Paris. The Belle Orchid e, Pissenlit Passable exhibition marks the start of a collaboration between the artist and the Galerie Mitterrand.