The neon-lit tenderness of the motorcycle in Wong Kar-wai’s film Fallen Angels has grown to be one of the most iconic shots in modern cinema. The scene captures a melancholic romanticism as Michelle Reis and Takeshi Kaneshiro’s characters become one with the bike that carries them forward, bodies folded atop one another.
In Fallen Angels, Tra My Nguyen tells a story of memory and movement. Taking title cues from the cult-classic neo-noir film, Nguyen draws urban poetry from diasporic perspectives for her new solo exhibition at GROTTO. The Berlin-based artist reimagines her childhood spent in Vietnam in a series of distorted vignettes, where mobility, body politics, and gender collide in the streets of Hanoi. With a practice encompassing textile, video, and sculpture, Nguyen rethinks material culture in a new light.
Much of the show’s work takes after Vietnamese motor cultures, where women adorn their bodies in clashing hues of floral print. “Riders’ Arc” positions a motorbike draped in such sun-protective materials. “Their generic floral patterns and easy-to-wear style moves quickly from design to vendors, relentlessly meeting the latest trends and exaggerating notions of mass-production,” Brooke Wilson writes in a gallery statement. “The garments engage both literally and metaphorically with notions of speed: skirts clip and wrap-around at the waist. Jackets zip all the way up to the head – fast, quick, and easy.”
Conversations between fabric and skin extend ideas of the body to digital and ergonomic forms. Nguyen uses her background in fashion design to muddy the harsh line between art and fashion to create a new body politic. “Bodies (The Lovers)” and “Day” engage in a similar textile-based approach as digital distortions render “glitch-like” patterns.
Fallen Angels looks for meaning in a hyper-globalized world, reflecting on both where we have been and where we are going. Now on view at GROTTO through August 29, 2024.
GROTTO Gallery
Bartningallee 5
Berlin, Germany
