Thủy Tiên Nguyễn: Quel mois sommes-nous, mon amour?

For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Bao in Paris, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn (born in 1993 in Hanoi) reflects artistically on culture, diaspora, and entertainment. Dividing her life and work between Hanoi and Frankfurt am Main, the artist recontextualizes 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 motorized pedestals. In this new body of work, conceived for the Galerie Bao space, she examines the first 21 episodes of the show, filmed in Paris at Studio Taratata.

Far more than a simple television show, Paris By Night occupied a unique 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 following the fall of Saigon in 1975. For audiences back home—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 spread of global pop culture driven by MTV and the dominance of Vietnamese adaptations of popular Chinese and international music, Paris By Night constituted a shared audiovisual space, connecting audiences separated by geography, politics, and historical experience.

The absence of precise documentation regarding this filming period lends a mythological dimension to Paris By Night’s backstage architecture and lighting mechanisms, allowing the artist to deploy a deep 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.