WINTERTHUR.- With the second edition of One Another, Fotomuseum Winterthur continues its dialogue between the collection and contemporary artists. The French-Vietnamese photographer Nhu Xuan Hua (*1989) engages with works from the collection. The title refers to encounters that give rise to a multilayered network of interrelationships, in which diversity and difference connect rather than divide.

In her multidisciplinary practice Nhu Xuan Hua delves into the construction of memory, the feeling of uprootedness and the legacy of the diaspora. Her first publication, Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory (Area Books, 2022), is based on family archives. She looks at the interplay of memory, time and digital transformation, examining how memories, emotions and traumas are at once passed on and lost. Working with a mix of narrative and conceptual imagery, amplified by means of mixed media, Hua develops surreal, dreamlike images that let loose the imagination and counteract forgetting.

Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a photographer for various international fashion houses including Dior, Maison Margiela, Kenzo and Gucci, as well as for magazines such as Vogue, TIME and Dazed Beauty.

The exhibition includes works from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur by Nobuyoshi Araki, Richard Avedon, Alan Belcher, Balthasar Burkhard, JH Engström, Ralph Gibson, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Rinko Kawauchi, Duane Michals, Aldo Sessa and Rolf Winnewisser.

Nhu Xuan Hua (b. 1989) studied art history and film before completing a photography course at the Auguste Renoir School in Paris in 2011. A year later, she moved to London, where she began working on national and international commissions. In 2021, she returned to Paris and, alongside her work in fashion photography, has since developed a multidisciplinary narrative practice. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, and Autograph in London. This exhibition marks her first presentation in an institutional context in Switzerland. Her works are held in the collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) in Paris, the JPMorgan Collection, and Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography in Amsterdam.





Selected Works

“To remember is to accept that something has been forgotten, that something has been lost, and something that was once owned needs to be found again.” – Nhu Xuan Hua. Nhu Xuan Hua, from the series Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory, 2017–2022

Má, Archive from the Year ‘88
Les Oubliées, Archive from the Year ‘70
The Fireplace, the Tulips and the Glass Table – Archive from the Year ‘80

Nhu Xuan Hua’s first photobook, Tropism, Consequences of a Displaced Memory (2022), is based on photographs from her family albums that have been altered by the artist. In this project, she explores the interplay of memory, time and digital manipulation in the context of her diasporic experience, examining how memories, emotions and traumas are passed on and at the same time lost. By combining narrative and conceptual elements, Nhu Xuan Hua develops surreal, dreamlike images that appeal to the imagination and resist the process of forgetting.

Nhu Xuan Hua, Gossip 1 and 2, from the series Let the Horses Ride, 2025

The photographs in the series Let the Horses Ride, with their inverted brightness and colour values, present re-enacted scenes from Nhu Xuan Hua’s family milieu. Conceived of as a site-specific artistic work for the rooms of the historic Hôtel de la Lauzière in Arles, the series was commissioned by Éditions Louis Vuitton. In it, friends make portraits of the artist’s relatives, creating an overlay of biological and chosen family. The inversion of colour and brightness values causes the figures to radiate light from within and gives them a spectral presence. The photographs thus address memory as something ambiguous: images that press themselves upon us and recur, that seemingly refer to reality but do not correspond to it.

Nhu Xuan Hua, Chen, 2016

In recent years questions of representation have increasingly become a topic of debate. Fashion photography has also been influenced by these social developments: the teams involved, both in front of and behind the camera, are becoming more diverse, and there is a growing tendency for photographers to introduce their own perspectives into commissioned work. Like many other photographers – among them, Nadine Ijewere and Tyler Mitchell – Nhu Xuan Hua has also used this shift to question normative ideals of beauty. Her work combines fashion photography with a personal visual language.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from the series Akt-Tokyo, 1971–1991

Nobuyoshi Araki’s (b. 1940) choice of motifs and his photographic aesthetic challenge social norms and conventions. His intense creative drive can be seen in over five hundred published photobooks, sometimes featuring the same images, which Araki revisits by putting them in new contexts. The photographs on display are part of a larger body of work that brings together images from two decades of artistic practice, whose juxtapositions give equal weight to personal dramas, intimacy and observations of everyday life. The six photographs show Araki bidding farewell to his wife Yoko, who died at an early age, as well as their cat Chiro – some of the images also figure in his well-known project Winter Journey.

Nan Goldin, Lil Laughing, Swampscott, MA, 1996

Nan Goldin’s (b. 1953) photographs tell stories of the bonds between people, of friendship, love and sexuality, while also speaking of violence, grief and loss. She organised her images, which often feature intense colours and harsh flash lighting, into narrative sequences that she presented in the form of slide shows. One of these sequences served as the starting point for her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which appeared as a book in 1986. She began applying her empathic yet unsparing gaze in the 1970s, capturing herself and people from her immediate environment in intimate, vulnerable moments. Not even her mother, Lil, could escape this gaze. The family scene, picturing Lil sitting on the bed, with a blue ball in each hand, is shaped by her double-edged laugh, which can also be read as a scream: a palpable tension can be felt as a result, poised between euphoria and despair.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from the series Ametsuchi, 2012

Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972) trains her camera on fragments of everyday life, on what she likes to call “the small voices in our world – those that whisper”. In this way, she transforms these details into something remarkable and full of meaning. Nature is a key motif in her work: drawing on the 18th-century idea of the sublime, she sees it as a source of wonder, awe and reverence. In Untitled, taken from the series Ametsuchi (Heaven and Earth), she focuses on the destructive power of fire, which is devastating in its action and fascinating at the same time. The work relates to Japanese rituals such as the tradition of controlled slash-and-burn farming (yakihata), which dates back some 1,300 years. It refers to natural cycles of destruction and renewal. Kawauchi and Nhu Xuan Hua are both interested in the power of ceremonies, customs and traditions that connect people across generations.

Duane Michals, Things Are Queer, 1972

Duane Michals’s (1932–2026) staged images call into question photography’s claim to represent reality. His conceptual approach, centred on the reflective nature of media, can be seen in the relationship between text and image and in his surreal, narrative sequences, which he has been developing since the 1960s – a period when, he maintains, photographic images were still regularly regarded as faithful portrayals of reality. The nine single images from Things Are Queer generate a closed loop: each photograph picks up on elements from the picture that precedes it, while the last motif leads back to the first. Repetition and scaling create the sense of a cinematic zoom, showing how constructed photographic reality can be.