Ngô Đình Bảo Châu

Satirical form and intertextuality 
By Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran 

Ngô Đình Bảo Châu, ‘Everything Falls Down, The Flames Go Up – Twin Kitchens’, 2020, cardboard, paper, imitation silver leaf, emulsion paint, L-brackets, screws, LED lights, 200 x 650 x 180cm. Made in collaboration with artist Nguyen Duc Dat, architect Laurent Serpe. Image courtesy of the artist and KAAREM.

Ngô Đình Bảo Châu is one of the emerging faces of the 8X artist generation, the Vietnamese way of calling people born in the 1980s. She has a background in lacquer painting from Ho Chi Minh City Fine Art University, a specialisation that requires immense manual skills, as well as an understanding in depth of the material configuration. Bảo Châu loves to experiment with materials and surface textures of objects. She does not stay too long in any particular material, leaping from traditional lacquer paint to resin, terrazzo, wood, paper, cement, steel, and even fabric and foam. 

Alongside her artistic practice, Bảo Châu also works with media agencies. Thus, conceptually, her works are concerned with the system of publicity, information dissemination, and mass appeal. This is explored within the contexts of the socialist state, religious symbolism, revolutionary manifesto of progressive intellectuals, and consumerist advertisement.

Ngô Đình Bảo Châu, ‘Layered Ego 1’ (installation view), 2019, trucchigraphy on silk, 18 Truc Chi paintings, 580 x 100 cm (3 pieces) and 580 x 150cm (15 pieces). Image courtesy of the artist and Vietnam Trúc Chỉ Art.

In recent years, Bảo Châu has become interested in paper and experimented with the material in different forms. They include paintings, graphic prints, Truc Chi (a method of painting with bamboo pulp) and architectural installation. One of her most remarkable paper works is ‘Everything falls down, the flames go up – Twin Kitchens’ (2020). In collaboration with artist Nguyễn Đức Đạt and architect Laurent Serpe, they remodelled the Frankfurt Kitchen out of cardboard, and even duplicated it, as if applying the principle of mass production that follows the modular units of modernist architecture. It is however an antithesis that contradicts the robustness of material in modernist design. The work also complicates the nature of kitchens, where fire, a life force, has the potential to destroy the entire paper installation.

Ngô Đình Bảo Châu, ‘Epaulette – Bench’ (foreground) and ‘Uniform – Wallpaper’ (background), both 2020, exhibition installation view in ‘Towards Realist Socialisation’ at Galerie Quynh, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.

Bảo Châu transforms materials in her artworks, and makes materiality a part of its overall concept. She dissects the modes of the ideology and how it propagates, and applies that to the way the work is manifested. In her print series ‘Uniform – Wallpaper’ (2020), the artist plays on the symbol of uniformity. Her purposeful repetition layers motifs of collective solidarity, from unions, associations and groups in the socialist political and educational institutions. Though they look identical, each of the 40 prints are unique. In ‘Epaulette – Bench’ (2020), the art object retains the shape of a military rank slide. Its magnification opens up new possibilities for it to exist as a sculpture, or a bench for visitors to sit on. However, the material weight of the concrete sculpture is not shy from hinting at the power symbolised by a rank slide. 

Through her sharp manipulation of material and scale, Bảo Châu is an artist eloquent in intertextuality, weaving relationships among fields, contexts and media. Her approach does not stop at form mimicking the conceptual. It is exaggerated, humorous and satirical.

Click here to read our dialogue with Ngô Đình Bảo Châu.