Marking 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Only Your Name is a group exhibition featuring new and recent work by artists of Vietnamese descent Hoa Dung Clerget, Vicky Đỗ and Duong Thuy Nguyen. The exhibition follows the journey of Vietnamese people migrating to the UK from 1975 onwards, preserving history through a Vietnamese lens and reflecting on the contemporary diaspora. Presented by SLQS Gallery in Shoreditch, the exhibition is situated close to Hackney’s Kingsland Road, also known as the ‘Pho Mile’, where many Vietnamese families settled from the late 1970s. 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.

This series comprises five small wall-based works between painting and sculpture. They depict Vietnamese female figures, framed within floral compositions that imitate the aesthetics of mother-of-pearl and lacquer. These images draw inspiration from languid poses rooted in Western iconography. By reappropriating these visual codes, the series challenges and subverts stereotypical and fetishised representations of Asian female bodies.

 

The term chinoiserie here can be understood as the aestheticisation of a mistranslation or a cultural misunderstanding. The confrontation with one’s own representation is often experienced as a form of violence producing confusion, disorientation, and emotional dissonance. These works play ironically with orientalist stereotypes and borrow visual references from Western art history (such as the harem motif or Millais’s Ophelia). Through these appropriations, the depicted figure seems to willingly adopt a form of travesty, assuming the codes of a foreign iconography. The goal is not to present an unfiltered reality, but rather a reconstructed image, filtered through recycled and often unconscious cultural references. 

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. Photographic reproduction and embossing become gestures of both preservation and distortion. In this act of reworking, the image is neither fully intact nor entirely lost, but exists in a state of suspension—an echo of the precariousness embedded within the historical subject itself. This body of work does not seek to reconstruct the past as it was, but rather to expose its fractures, its absences, and its persistent echoes. 

Vicky Đỗ (b. Vietnam) is an artist and curator based in Saigon. Her artistic research includes displacement and the politics of urban planning, as well as the traumas of conflicts on the landscape and the body. She centres her practice around different interpretations of historical events that challenge the legitimacy of the grand narrative in history. 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). 

 

 

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.

 

Recen solo exhibition include: The Trung Sisters (SLQS Gallery, 2026); Durian Revolution (Studio Chapple, 2023) and group exhibitions: Fringe (LABS Contemporary Art, Bologna, 2025), Only Your Name (SLQS Gallery, 2025); Porous Abstraction (Alma Pearl, 2025), A Landscape of Chance (SLQS Gallery), tươi sống (Harlesden High Street, 2024), Beauty Tech Art Spa (Cornershop, 2023) and Paradise (Harlesden High Street, Lecce, 2022).

 

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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 an MA in Fine Arts 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.  She is currently a resident artist at the Museum of the Home as part of the Vietnamese Archives Artist Residency: Library of Ancestral Knowledge.

 

Solo Exhibition upcoming: Vin Gallery (HCMC, Vietnam, 2026). Recent exhibitions include: Only Your Name (SLQS Gallery, 2025); 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).