Started in 2015 by the visual artist Ly Hoàng Ly, this project is the journey of the artist’s research and exploration on how the structure of the contemporary society works, on what people expect and desire in their lives, on the ideals that people hold, on their own illusions and their own disappointments, on the real and the fake, on building the infrastructure (or structure-making) and structure-breaking, on the trust that individuals carry in what they believe they already know and what is left un-known, and on what people are told along with what they witness or experience.
Honey is ‘Mật’ in Vietnamese and has 3 meanings: the first meaning is honey or sweetness, the second meaning is bile, proverbial for its bitterness, and the third one is top secret or confidential.
The artist is fascinated in turning up and down, flipping right and left all of these meanings and concepts of ‘Mật’, breaking them into pieces and then using all fragments, conceptually and structurally, to build a shape out of them with the manners of sculptural public art, paintings, and film. This gesture is to create a visual world which relates to the post-factual society we are living in, we get benefits from and then digest it while we interact with both regular and irregular mechanisms in this kind of society.
The ongoing project Honey Honey Honey or The Fragments of Trust have been realizing with the collaboration in chemistry of the chemist DAo Thanh Hai, Ph.D, Princeton University. The public art itself is realized with the supervisor in construction from the architect Hồ Đình Chiêu, The Five & Partners Company. (Text courtesy of the artist)
The sculpture can be found in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where it was first installed at A. Farm international art residency in District 12, in May 2018. In July 2019 it moved to the EMASI school Nam Long Campus in District 7.