PRESS RELEASE
Solemn Rehearsals
Text by Iris Ziyao Li
On February 2, 1861, French Catholic missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard was executed in Vietnam.
A few days before his death, he wrote a letter from prison to his father in a tone of remarkable calm, seeking to comfort his family by saying that he was about to enter Heaven. In the letter, he wrote: “We are but flowers in God’s garden, waiting to be plucked.” The Church later preserved the letter as a martyr’s relic.
Over a century later, the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo returned to this letter, not as a historical document to be displayed, but as the basis for an act of repeated transcription. He asked his father, Phung Vo, to copy it out by hand. Though Phung Vo does not understand French, he meticulously reproduces the text in the elegant cursive script he learned under French colonial rule. For him, the letter does not first present itself as language, but as form: lines, spacing, rhythm, gesture. A document once charged with faith, mortality, and farewell is thus carried into another life through an ongoing labour of transcription.
A letter written by a 19th-century missionary to his father, copied by a 20th-century Vietnamese immigrant, and received again in the present. Perhaps this is what makes 2.2.1861 deeply affecting. It is not only a work about colonialism, martyrdom, or the bond between father and son; it also asks a simpler, yet more elusive question:
How do we commit ourselves seriously to something we do not fully understand?
Phung Vo’s incomplete understanding does not empty the letter of force. On the contrary, its gravity persists through copying, circulation, and display. Meaning is neither fixed at the point of origin nor secured by fullunderstanding. It is carried, displaced, and renewed through repetition.
From this perspective, another question begins to emerge: when something solemn is sustained through repetition, translation, and incomprehension, does it remain unchanged, or does it take on a quality that is also performative, tentative, evenstrangely theatrical?
Something of this tension is staged, in a very different register, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s characters invent identities, inhabit false names, and pursue desire through performance. Yet the play does not simply expose deception. Instead, it suggests that truth does not always arrive through direct declaration. Sometimes it appears indirectly, through rehearsal, substitution, and artifice. What seems frivolous turns out to be structurally revealing. What appears unserious becomes the very condition through which something real can be recognised.
Solemn Rehearsals begins from this tension. Bringing together more than thirty works across different periods, geographies, and cultural backgrounds, the exhibition considers whether what matters most must always appear in elevated, stable, or monumental form. Might seriousness also reside in detour, distortion, play, or repetition? Might conviction survive precisely where coherence begins to loosen?
In Duan Jianyu’s Hey, Hello, Hi! No. 6, imagery drawn from Bada Shanren is set against a surface animated by casual, almost throwaway greetings. Yet the work does not dissolve into lightness. Instead, an unexpected gravity gathers within this seemingly offhand language. In Adam Alessi’s Bug (Contact), the encounter between an alien form and a human face opens onto a psychic space that is grotesque, intimate, and difficult to name. The work feels excessive, even absurd, yet its charge is anything but trivial.
A related shift appears in Yu Ji’s sculptures. In ancient Chinese statuary, the bodies of Buddhas and bodhisattvas often served as a vehicle for devotional form: idealised, codified, and sustained by material weight, scale, and ritual order. Yu Ji proceeds otherwise. Casting fragments of the body in cement, she retains fracture, distortion, and incompletion. These forms do not reject gravity so much as relocate it. In place of symbolic wholeness, they bring us closer to the body as lived: contingent, vulnerable, and unfinished.
Perhaps we are not meant to understand something fully before we can approach it with seriousness. More often, things endure through partial understanding, through repetition, through acts of copying, staging, and transmission. They persist in fragments, in substitutions, in forms that do not announce their significance at once. It may be precisely within these seemingly slight rehearsals that something real becomes perceptible again.
Solemn Rehearsals
Text by Iris Ziyao Li
On February 2, 1861, French Catholic missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard was executed in Vietnam.
A few days before his death, he wrote a letter from prison to his father in a tone of remarkable calm, seeking to comfort his family by saying that he was about to enter Heaven. In the letter, he wrote: “We are but flowers in God’s garden, waiting to be plucked.” The Church later preserved the letter as a martyr’s relic.
Over a century later, the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo returned to this letter, not as a historical document to be displayed, but as the basis for an act of repeated transcription. He asked his father, Phung Vo, to copy it out by hand. Though Phung Vo does not understand French, he meticulously reproduces the text in the elegant cursive script he learned under French colonial rule. For him, the letter does not first present itself as language, but as form: lines, spacing, rhythm, gesture. A document once charged with faith, mortality, and farewell is thus carried into another life through an ongoing labour of transcription.
A letter written by a 19th-century missionary to his father, copied by a 20th-century Vietnamese immigrant, and received again in the present. Perhaps this is what makes 2.2.1861 deeply affecting. It is not only a work about colonialism, martyrdom, or the bond between father and son; it also asks a simpler, yet more elusive question:
How do we commit ourselves seriously to something we do not fully understand?
Phung Vo’s incomplete understanding does not empty the letter of force. On the contrary, its gravity persists through copying, circulation, and display. Meaning is neither fixed at the point of origin nor secured by fullunderstanding. It is carried, displaced, and renewed through repetition.
From this perspective, another question begins to emerge: when something solemn is sustained through repetition, translation, and incomprehension, does it remain unchanged, or does it take on a quality that is also performative, tentative, evenstrangely theatrical?
Something of this tension is staged, in a very different register, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s characters invent identities, inhabit false names, and pursue desire through performance. Yet the play does not simply expose deception. Instead, it suggests that truth does not always arrive through direct declaration. Sometimes it appears indirectly, through rehearsal, substitution, and artifice. What seems frivolous turns out to be structurally revealing. What appears unserious becomes the very condition through which something real can be recognised.
Solemn Rehearsals begins from this tension. Bringing together more than thirty works across different periods, geographies, and cultural backgrounds, the exhibition considers whether what matters most must always appear in elevated, stable, or monumental form. Might seriousness also reside in detour, distortion, play, or repetition? Might conviction survive precisely where coherence begins to loosen?
In Duan Jianyu’s Hey, Hello, Hi! No. 6, imagery drawn from Bada Shanren is set against a surface animated by casual, almost throwaway greetings. Yet the work does not dissolve into lightness. Instead, an unexpected gravity gathers within this seemingly offhand language. In Adam Alessi’s Bug (Contact), the encounter between an alien form and a human face opens onto a psychic space that is grotesque, intimate, and difficult to name. The work feels excessive, even absurd, yet its charge is anything but trivial.
A related shift appears in Yu Ji’s sculptures. In ancient Chinese statuary, the bodies of Buddhas and bodhisattvas often served as a vehicle for devotional form: idealised, codified, and sustained by material weight, scale, and ritual order. Yu Ji proceeds otherwise. Casting fragments of the body in cement, she retains fracture, distortion, and incompletion. These forms do not reject gravity so much as relocate it. In place of symbolic wholeness, they bring us closer to the body as lived: contingent, vulnerable, and unfinished.
Perhaps we are not meant to understand something fully before we can approach it with seriousness. More often, things endure through partial understanding, through repetition, through acts of copying, staging, and transmission. They persist in fragments, in substitutions, in forms that do not announce their significance at once. It may be precisely within these seemingly slight rehearsals that something real becomes perceptible again.