Excerpt: The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower

Hằng Hằng’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Bao

Over the years, we have republished parts of long-form writing, from catalogue essays to book chapters. This practice is now formalised as part of our Excerpts series. If you would like to work with us to republish a text, please email us at info@artandmarket.net. 

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition essay written by Stéphane Degoutin for The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower (2025). It is Hằng Hằng’s first solo show at Galerie Bao, Paris.

Hằng Hằng, The Reason Is A Dog. The Reason Is A Flower., 2025, exhibition installation view at Galerie Bao, Paris. Photo by Nancy Karam. Image courtesy of Galerie Bao.

Hằng Hằng calls her installation a “garden”. The word feels familiar, reassuring, but nothing here resembles a place of greenery or rest. The gallery is immersed in an intense saturated chroma-blue, the very same blue once used for video backdrops. One feels that everything here could be erased, replaced, rewritten.

Even the air carries an imprint. It is infused with a scent that recreates petrichor, the characteristic smell of wet earth rising when rain falls on dry soil. Hằng Hằng composed it with the help of International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF).

Shimmering fragments with a metallic sheen are suspended within this monochrome field, while on a screen a house in Vietnam collapses under the force of machines. Two histories unfold in parallel yet never converge.

Hằng Hằng, The Reason Is A Dog. The Reason Is A Flower., 2025, exhibition installation view at Galerie Bao, Paris. Photo by Nancy Karam. Image courtesy of Galerie Bao.

Hằng Hằng, The Reason Is A Dog. The Reason Is A Flower., 2025, performance documentation taken during the exhibition opening at Galerie Bao, Paris. Photo by Nancy Karam. Image courtesy of Galerie Bao.

When first presented in 2023 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), the installation Bố không biết mình đang ở đâu (I [the father] don’t know where I am) (2023) featured three performers dressed in blue reciting a poem in turn, each in a different language: Vietnamese, English, French. The text unfolded but the meaning of the words slipped away in fragments, leaving the audience suspended in the fissure between languages, experiencing the untranslatable. From a suitcase, the artist drew drawings, books, photographs. Nothing resembling a demonstration, a narrative, let alone an explanation. The gesture evoked instead an opening, an offering, an intimate sharing. In that moment, it became clear that this garden was not a backdrop but a place where one opens to memory, to silence, to forms that refuse explanation.

Hằng Hằng no longer lives in Vietnam. Distance, geographical and cultural, renders her partly a stranger to her own country, even to her own family. Much of her practice begins in this space of distance.

Hằng Hằng, Unforgotten land, 2025, hair, faux leather fabric, dimensions variable. Installation view in Setouchi Triennale (2025) at Kagawa Museum in Takamatsu, Japan. Image courtesy of the artist.

In another installation Unforgotten land (2025), presented at the 2025 Setouchi Triennale at the Kagawa Museum, Japan, she asked her relatives to weave a carpet out of real hair, collected from the family’s hair salon, then assembled by their hands. Involving the family was not a mere symbolic gesture: it was giving body to a shared memory, even if it remained fragmentary. It was making the process of fabrication an essential part of the work, as important as its result.

This is not the first time Hằng Hằng has worked with and through her family. She spent several years exploring a house where her grandparents had once met. Then, for decades, the house stood empty, sheltering only the portraits of ancestors placed on an altar. Around it, the city had grown, slowly swallowing this traditional dwelling, like an empty box adrift in the sprawl of an overcrowded periphery. It is a similar situation happening to many  neighbourhoods on the outskirts of major metropolises.

Hằng Hằng, The Reason Is A Dog. The Reason Is A Flower., 2025, exhibition installation view at Galerie Bao, Paris. Photo by Nancy Karam. Image courtesy of Galerie Bao.

Then, suddenly, it was gone. The house was destroyed, replaced by a newer, more modern one. From the salvaged beams, she asked her father to craft a sealed box, inside which she placed a book she had written about this house: four hundred pages where family history intertwined with that of the country, war, politics, love, forgetting, the place of women in Vietnamese society. The book was written in three languages: French, Vietnamese, and English, without translation from one to another. Once again, the impossible translation.

The object itself resisted. The box was shut with headless nails driven deep into the wood. There is no manual for opening it. One has to figure it out. To reach its contents, one might have to break it. Or else accept that some stories remain closed. Closing the box might already have been a way of stepping out of those memories.

Hằng Hằng. Photo by Nancy Karam. Image courtesy of Galerie Bao.

These strategies of withholding, of resistance to transparency, recur throughout Hằng Hằng’s work. Rather than illustrating a story, she unsettles it. She constructs porous spaces where forms, languages, and gestures resist explanation, where narratives fragment and dissipate. The viewer is invited to wander through them, to feel the absence, to experience the gap.

In The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower, Hằng Hằng creates the garden that is not a garden. Against this backdrop, the smell of earth, voices in many tongues, gestures of offering, destruction, and resistance, memory and the present intersect. Everything coexists, in tension, without ever reducing one thing to another.


This article is presented in partnership with Galerie Bao.

Hằng Hằng: The Reason is a Dog. The Reason is a Flower is on view from 12 September to 4 October 2025, at Galerie Bao, Paris.