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

Drawing on the little-known beginnings of Paris By Night, filmed in Paris, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn composes an exhibition in which sculpture, movement and memory intertwine. Galerie Bao becomes the stage for a suspended history, traversed by the stories of the Vietnamese diaspora and the enduring cycles of remembrance.

For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Bao in Paris, Thủy Tiên Nguyễn (born in 1993 in Hanoi) explores culture, the diaspora and entertainment.

Sharing her life and work between Hanoi and Frankfurt am Main, the artist recontextualises the iconic variety programme Paris By Night, continuing 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 turns to the first 21 episodes of the programme, filmed in Paris at the Taratata studio.

Far more than a simple television show, 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 the public who remained at home, where the programme 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 carried by MTV and the dominance of Vietnamese adaptations of Chinese and international popular music, 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 areas and the lighting mechanisms of Paris By Night, allowing the artist to develop a profound reflection on legibility, exile and the perpetual mechanical loop of history.