Ly Hoàng Ly

Ly Hoàng Ly is a multidisciplinary artist working across poetry, painting, video, performance art, installation and public art. She studied painting in Vietnam, later earning an MFA in Art in Studio (sculpture) through The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Fulbright Scholarship. She also works as an editor of Youth Publishing House in Ho Chi Minh City. Ly is the first women visual artist in Vietnam doing performance art and poetry performance. Her installations incorporate a level of performance or activation between subjects and objects that unlock sensual affects in the human-materiality nexus.

Ly’s previous works make bodily references to women’s cultural experiences of maternity and ministrations as well as highlight human emotions and our relationship to place and nature. Since 2011, Ly has explored the relationship of freedom and surveillance, inherited trauma, the ephemeral materiality of memory, the dislocation and the importance of community and human connection. Her art raises questions about the general human conditions, the critical states of society, and our shared issues of migration and immigration. It speaks not only on a personal level, but also on a global scale: of (mis)understandings and (mis)placement, of (trans)forming identity and being rootless, of adaptation and acceptance, of division and union, and of being human.