Artist: Nhu Xuan Hua

Autograph presents the first solo exhibition of the French Vietnamese artist Nhu Xuan Hua. The exhibition spans both gallery spaces at the Shoreditch building, featuring newly commissioned work presented for the first time.

Working at the intersection of art and fashion photography, Hua reflects on the fragility of memory and the ways stories are communicated – or withheld – across generations. She reimagines archival photographs from her family’s time in Vietnam, and their early years in Europe, to create dreamlike digitally-altered compositions that shift between recognition and distortion. Across her work, Hua builds elaborate visual reconstructions that echo how memory in the diaspora can splinter, blur and slip from view.

Born and raised in Paris to immigrant parents who fled to Europe after the war in Vietnam (1955-1975), Hua grew up feeling a palpable distance from her Vietnamese heritage. Questions about the past were often met with the refrain Why are you asking? The past belongs to the past.

This loss of vocabulary – essential to understanding her own history – was further compounded by a communication void between Hua and her parents. Her father, who is oral-deaf, communicates in spoken Vietnamese and a broken, self-taught form of French Sign Language which he learned in the late 1970s after arriving in Paris. Across generations, there was no common language spoken in the household.

These silences, formed through migration and cultural rupture, reverberate through the diluted contours of bodies in her reworked family photographs, where figures merge and dissolve into one another.