Vy Trịnh

Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Artist statement

I was born and raised in the bustling streets of Saigon, Vietnam, where moped tires are both makeshift signs for tire repair businesses and stools for resting and eating – no/thing becomes wasted. Taking cues from the ways in which everyday people inhabit these material processes from street-level, my making tendencies and visual cues come from the fabric of the built environment. My current work explores how networks of objects extend beyond themselves and reflect the larger socio-economic textures and conditions of my hometown, Saigon, Vietnam after the neoliberal Đổi Mới reforms. Materials and objects are sourced from different economies and ecologies—infrastructural, automotive, electric, discarded. I incorporate and work with found objects through addition, subtraction, and calibration to maintain the integrity of the economies and industries they come from. Tying, balancing, bundling, and welding are making tendencies borrowed from the city dwellers and manual workers I’ve observed and grown up around. I am interested in the ways objects constantly mutate and adapt as they adopt multiple lives through the circulation between different sites and usages. In my sculptures, methodologies and material content are intertwined, insisting on resourcefulness and a make-shift ethos indebted to the city’s polyrhythmic, cyclical, and sedimented material environment. My work follows the traffic of objects, different forms of labor and agency, and the sites where these categories...

Artwork