For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Bao in Paris, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn (born in 1993 in Hanoi) develops an artistic reflection on culture, the diaspora and entertainment. Sharing her life and work between Hanoi and Frankfurt am Main, the artist recontextualises the cult variety show Paris By Night, pursuing a kinetic exploration of staging and memory.
Continuing her exploration of sculpture, Thủy Tiên presents a series of glass monuments installed on motorised plinths. In this new body of work, conceived for the space of Galerie Bao, she examines the first 21 episodes of the show, filmed in Paris at the Taratata studio.
Far more than a simple television programme, Paris By Night occupied a singular place in Vietnamese cultural history. For diaspora communities (the Việt Kiều), it served as a site of memory, preserving musical repertoires, visual aesthetics and cultural expressions that had disappeared from public life in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. For audiences who remained in the country, where the show circulated through informal and pirated networks, it offered, during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, a rare window onto the outside world and an alternative cultural horizon. Before the widespread global pop culture carried by MTV and the dominance of Vietnamese adaptations of Chinese and international popular songs, Paris By Night constituted a shared audiovisual space, connecting audiences separated by geography, politics and historical experience.
The absence of precise documentation about this filming period lends a mythological dimension to the architecture of the backstage and the lighting mechanisms of Paris By Night, allowing the artist to deploy a profound reflection on legibility, exile and the perpetual mechanical loop of history. In this exhibition, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn transforms Galerie Bao into both a time capsule and a stage space. Suspended between stillness and movement, the exhibition reactivates fragments of a shared cultural memory.