Inherited silences, fading faces, flickering memories: Nhu Xuan Hua signs her first solo exhibition in the UK with Autograph, an association dedicated to visual arts in London.
A work that questions what is passed down, or left unsaid, from one generation to the next. Figures dissolve, family archives become blurred, everyday scenes slip into the uncanny. This is not an effect, it is a method. A way of working that reveals something essential about the artist herself.
Born in 1989 in Paris to refugee parents who had fled post-war Vietnam, Nhu Xuan Hua grew up in a house where three languages coexisted without really merging: Vietnamese, French, and a self-taught form of sign language that her deaf father had learned after arriving in France in 1978. The absence of a common language within the home profoundly influenced Hua, for whom photography became the only way to express what words could not formulate.
Born from the limitations of language, "Of Walking on Fire" explores the fragility of the transmission—or non-transmission—of stories from one generation to the next, inviting us to reflect on how diasporic memory can fragment, fade, and disappear. Curated by Bindi Vora, the exhibition unfolds this work across the two galleries of Autograph's iconic building in Shoreditch.
The first room focuses on the theme of absence, exploring the consequences of missed conversations and gaps in family history. The series Tropism: Consequences of a Displaced Memory (“Tropism: Consequences of a Displaced Memory”) draws on personal photographic archives—the early years of his extended family in Belgium and France—and subjects them to digital manipulation that dissolves outlines, merges silhouettes, and erases without deleting. The resulting images are neither documents nor fictions: they occupy that intermediate space where the past resides, somewhere in that unstable space where memory reconfigures itself, between persistence and loss. Around the prints, objects arranged on ornamental shelves evoke the altars of Vietnamese temples, as if each photograph were also an offering. This series first took the form of a book published in 2022, the artist's debut work, which already laid the foundations for this visual language between dissolution and persistence.
The series Let the Horses Ride (“Let the Horses Run”) takes this logic further. Hua extends this reflection by approaching memory as a site of tension and invention rather than a stable archive. The images, inverted like photographic negatives, disrupt perception: scenes of apparent familial closeness, where one believes one sees tenderness, become charged with a muted tension, ambiguous, almost unsettling. This formally simple proposition is destabilizing: memory is not a faithful archive, but a narrative that is constantly rewritten to find a habitable space within it. As the artist explains: “By recreating scenes from everyday life, drawn from my scattered memories, it’s as if the events are being replayed to reinvent the narrative […] In this quest lies the immense desire to restore a sacred character to the most ordinary things.”
The second gallery opens onto something less painful, without tipping into resolution, where the works unfold as a space for renewal. Autograph commissioned nine new works from Nhu Xuan Hua—two of which will enter the permanent collection—that trace a lineage of maternal figures based on the Vietnamese spiritual tradition of Đạo Mẫu, the worship of the Mother Goddess. Thus, Little Super in Versailles – Archive from the year '88 (The Super Little Girl at Versailles – Archive of the Year 1988) depicts a little girl in the gardens of Versailles, her face unfocused, bearing both the lightness of childhood and the weight of inherited stories. The female figure becomes a force of transmission, not despite the silences, but through them.
What distinguishes Nhu Xuan Hua is her ability to work at the intersection of fashion photography and contemporary art, without reducing one to the other. A collaborator with Dior, Maison Margiela, Kenzo, and Gucci, and a regular contributor to Vogue et Dazed BeautyIn parallel, she develops a profoundly introspective body of work that owes nothing to the commissioned genre.
"Of Walking on Fire" is neither a confession nor a simple autobiography. It is a visual, patient, rigorous investigation into how family stories fragment in exile, impacting those who carry them without being able to tell them.
“Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire”
Autograph
Rivington Place, London (England)
Until September 19, 2026
