Only Your Name
Hoa Dung Clerget | Vicky Đỗ | Duong Thuy Nguyen
6 June - 12 July 2025
“When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019)
Marking fifty years since the end of the Vietnam War, Only Your Name is a group exhibition featuring new and recent works by Vicky Đỗ, Duong Thuy Nguyen and Hoa Dung Clerget - three artists of Vietnamese descent. The exhibition explores how identity is inherited, imposed, fractured and reimagined across generations and geopolitical boundaries.
Presented by SLQS Gallery in its newly established permanent space in Shoreditch, the exhibition is situated near Kingsland Road, affectionately known as ‘Pho Mile’, a historic area where many Vietnamese families settled following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.
Only Your Name traces the legacy of migration from Vietnam to the UK, reflecting on diasporic memory through a contemporary lens. Personal and political histories intertwine as each artist navigates the complex interplay between collective experience and individual self-representation.
From now on by Vicky Đỗ re-traces the path of Vietnamese refugees to Hong Kong in a poetic half-hour video essay. Weaving together covert recordings of immigration interviews, personal testimonies and scholarly reflections, Đỗ challenges institutional definitions of a ‘refugee’ while exposing the contradictions in Hong Kong’s immigration policy, past and present. At once a historical excavation and introspective narrative, the work meditates on belonging, memory and the politics of exclusion.
Duong Thuy Nguyen’s new series, If they survive, they are refugees, reimagines Joan Wakelin’s late-1980s photographs of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong’s detention centres, held in the V&A permanent collection. Through a tactile process of embossing archival images into aluminium and encasing them in wax, Nguyen transforms documentary evidence into ghostly, almost sacred relics. Her practice interrogates what history preserves, what it forgets, and how memory lingers in the gaps. The works resist nostalgia, instead creating a suspended space in which the past is neither resolved nor erased.
Chinoiserie by Hoa Dung Clerget is a striking new series of wall based works between painting and sculptures, rendered in layers of nail gel polish, gel builder and resin. These richly textured forms examine the complex terrain of Western cultural representations while opening portals to reimagine diasporic identity for second-generation Vietnamese descendants. This collection of small hybrid objects revisit and distort stereotypical and fetishised portrayals of Asian women. Clerget’s sculptures reclaim and refract inherited imagery, exploring how identity is constructed through both resistance and adaptation.
About the Artists
Vicky Đỗ (b. Vietnam) is an artist and curator based in Saigon. Her work engages themes of displacement, urban planning and archival practice. A former curator at Sàn Art, the longest-running independent art space in Saigon, Đỗ has also worked in Hong Kong as a researcher and independent artist. She is a member of Floating Projects and Archive of the People Collective (Hong Kong) and holds an MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong.
Her work has been shown at Bangkok Independent Film Festival (2025), SLQS Gallery Screening Room (2024), Para/Site, Hong Kong (2019), Seoul Media City Biennale (2018), Hanoi DocFest (2017), and others. Đỗ has received the Australia Council for the Arts’ International Art Leadership Fellowship (2019–22) and the Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellowship in Asian Art (2022).
Duong Thuy Nguyen (b. Vietnam) is an artist and writer working between Hanoi and London. Her interdisciplinary practice engages with memory, displacement and overlooked histories. Through experimental strategies, she reshapes knowledge production and fosters critical dialogue around colonial legacies, marginalisation, and industrialisation.
Nguyen holds a BA from Central Saint Martins, where she was awarded the Maison/0 This Earth Award and the FRESH TAKE 2023 Prize. Her work is also held in the UAL Collection. Recent exhibitions include: New Art Exchange Open 24 (Nottingham), Enigma of Arrival (RCA, London), No Place Like Home (Museum of the Home, London) and The Space Between (TMLightning Gallery, London, 2023).
In 2024, her work was acquired and is in the permanent collection of UAL. She is currently a resident artist at the Museum of the Home as part of the Vietnamese Archives Artist Residency: Library of Ancestral Knowledge.
Hoa Dung Clerget (b. France) lives and works in the UK. Her sculptural and installation-based practice explores the labour, aesthetics and social realities of immigrant women, often through the lens of nail art subculture. Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘liminal’, Clerget investigates how diasporic identities are shaped in spaces of cultural negotiation and reinvention. Using everyday materials such as gel nail polish, she creates tactile works that blur the boundaries between art, beauty and subculture.
Clerget holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA Hons in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.
Recent exhibitions include: solo show Durian Revolution (Studio Chapple, 2023) and group exhibitions Porous Abstraction (Alma Pearl, 2025), tươi sống (Harlesden High Street, 2024), Beauty Tech Art Spa (Cornershop, 2023) and Paradise (Harlesden High Street, Lecce, 2022).