Vy Trịnh

Exploring contemporary urbanity
By Yu Ke Dong

Vy Trịnh, ‘Untitled Fans (Senko)’, 2022-2023, fan guards and brass, 178 x 142 x 79cm. Image courtesy of Galerie Quynh.

Bristling steel beams, twisting electrical wires, and even a cannibalized motorcycle chassis—Vy Trịnh’s delicate yet energetic sculptures, created almost entirely with found industrial materials, capture the artist’s eclectic vision of Vietnam’s urban environments. Born in 1996 in Ho Chi Minh City, Trịnh enrolled in the Bachelors of Fine Arts programme at the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City, where she took her first sculpture classes. Graduating from Parsons in 2019, Trịnh went on to undertake a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, deepening her engagement with sculpture while incorporating other disciplines such as anthropology and film into her artistic practice. Her works have since been exhibited by Atelier Art Gallery (Philadelphia), White Columns (New York), and most recently, Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City).

Urban structures and materials emerge as key themes in Trịnh’s work, guiding the artist’s exploration of the relationship between the individual and the post-industrial city. In 2023, Trịnh was invited to stage a site-responsive intervention as part of UNESCO’s Hanoi Festival of Creative Design. Taking over a massive, defunct electric station at Gia Lâm Train Factory, Trịnh created ‘Overvoltage’, a sprawling web of aluminum bars, silicon strips and light bulbs that interpolated the station’s spaces. Created entirely on-site, the work demonstrates Trịnh’s fascination with urban space, her desire to create something unfamiliar and otherworldly from everyday interactions with the industrial environment.

In 2024, Trịnh presented her first solo exhibition ‘On Da Dream’ at Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City. Constructed from clothing racks, motorcycle organs and car parts, the exhibition extends Trịnh’s experimentation with the material traces of contemporary urbanity, playing with the motion and weight of industrial materials. For instance, the artist’s ‘Speedy Curve’ series (2024) demonstrates how steel itself can break free from its static rigidity, twisting and arcing lightly through the air as if alive. In ‘Chandelier’ (2024), Trinh creates an entangled mass of wires, metal ribbons, and other machine parts that hang heavily in the air, reminiscent of the heavily knotted electrical wires that lie suspended over many of Ho Chi Minh City’s streets. 

Vy Trịnh, ‘VISION’, 2024, Honda Vision moped chassis, flat steel bar, steel rod, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, wheel, rebar, hex nut, stators, copper wire, brass, flux and rhinestone mesh, 166 x 230 x 175cm. Image courtesy of Galerie Quynh.

While Trịnh’s works take industrial materiality as its core theme, they also seek to examine the very concept of industrial development itself, and its relationship with individuals. Inspiring the exhibition’s title, her work ‘DREAM’ (2024) appropriates the hollowed body of a Honda Dream motorcycle, transforming its silhouette with twisted wires and steel bars. Her other sculptures, ‘VISION’ (2024) and ‘FUTURE’ (2024), likewise incorporate the stripped chassis of the Honda Vision and Honda Future respectively, with rods, ribbons and chains sprouting from the motorcycles’ gutted frames. Trịnh’s centring of the motorcycle as an integral and necessary aspect of everyday Vietnamese lives, as well as her play on the words “dream”, “vision” and “future”, underscore the condition of contemporary urbanity as one that is constantly forward-looking, striving toward an ever-elusive collective dream that fuels an unceasing desire for progress.

Click here to read our dialogue with Vy Trịnh, where she discusses sculpture as a medium of self-expression, and her solo exhibition, ‘On Da Dream’, at Galerie Quynh.