» Bowl of Sorrow

Nguyen Thuy Hang creates imaginative spaces through her writing, while giving physical form to her fictional characters through sculpture and painting. In her installation, these hybrid figures – half-human, half-animal – hover in mid-air, emerge from beneath the ground, or protrude from everyday objects. Their forms are at once organic and fantastical, as if drawn from fairytales or folklore.

In Bowl of Sorrow, a wooden cabinet is fused with the hybrid forms of indefinable creatures, evoking how grief and memory twist, transform, and stitch themselves into the fabric of everyday life. Inspired by the Buddhist concept of Ái biệt ly khổ – the suffering of separation from a loved one or place – the work reflects on the inevitability of loss, illness, death, and unrequited love. It stands as a meditation on life’s impermanence and continual change.