LONDON.- Working at the intersection of art and fashion photography, Nhu Xuan Hua reflects on the fragility of how stories are communicated – or withheld – across generations.
Rooted in language’s inability to fully convey complex family histories, Hua reimagines archival photographs from her family’s time in Vietnam and their early years in Europe. These uncanny, dreamlike compositions echo how memory within the diaspora can splinter, blur and slip from view. Of Walking on Fire considers how the past continues to reverberate into the future – and how silence can persist, even in moments of gathering and togetherness.
Born and raised in Paris to immigrant parents who fled to Europe after the war in Vietnam (1955-1975), Hua grew up feeling a palpable distance from her Vietnamese heritage. Questions about the past were often met with the refrain Why are you asking? The past belongs to the past.
This loss of vocabulary – essential to understanding her own history – was further compounded by a communication void between Hua and her parents. Her father, who is oral-deaf, communicates in spoken Vietnamese and a broken, self-taught form of French Sign Language, which he learned in the late 1970s after arriving in Paris. Across generations, there was no common language spoken in the household, profoundly influencing Hua’s artistic practice.
Of Walking on Fire spans both galleries at Autograph, with Gallery 1 tracing the consequences of lost conversations and gaps in Hua’s personal history. Silences shaped by migration and cultural rupture reverberate through her reworked family photographs, where figures merge and dissolve into one another. Scenes of apparent closeness feel unsettled or ambiguous, foregrounding the tensions inherent in remembering.
"Drawn from my scattered memories, it is as if events are replayed to reinvent the narrative and the story: a mother eats a slice of bread while watching her children, wondering how to do better. In this quest lies the immense desire to restore the sacred to the most ordinary things."
– Nhu Xuan Hua
Throughout the exhibition, Hua’s photographs are presented alongside trinkets, objects and flower vases arranged on ornamental shelves, drawing on the visual language of Vietnamese temples. Painted shadows reference the quiet architecture of the family home.
Gallery 2 unfolds as a space of renewal, where what was once held in silence gathers strength and is carried forward. Hua traces a lineage of maternal figures in her life, drawing on the symbolism of the Vietnamese spiritual tradition of Đạo Mẫu – Mother Goddess worship – which honours female deities closely connected to the elements of Earth, Water and the Mountains.
At the heart of Gallery 2 is a new work, Little Super in Versailles – Archive from the year ’88, which imagines a young girl as a powerful symbolic figure carrying the weight of inherited histories. The feminine form emerges as a restorative force, as Hua reimagines her mother, grandmother and herself, asking: when language collapses, what forms of connection can still be carried forward?
Supporting artists to create new work has been a part of Autograph’s mission for more than 35 years. For this exhibition, we commissioned Nhu Xuan to create new series of 9 works. Two works from the commission will enter Autograph’s permanent collection of photography.
