Việt Lê’s exhibition trăng trắng | milk moon explores divination as a way of perceiving meaning through signs, pop culture symbols, and embodied experience. Drawing from Vietnamese Đạo Mẫu Mother Goddess religion and the artist’s practice as a “V-Pop shaman,” the installation proposes that spiritual insight emerges through daily life and “slow looking.” For Lê, research, ritual, and art practice are coeval. Visitors are encouraged to embrace their intuition through attention and reflection.
First, engaging the viewer via scent and sound, incense on an altered altar/ofrenda fills the air while low chants reverberate. Monumental Buddhist festival flags hover—sculptural forms and screens: visions, voices, vixens. One projection: while hiking, the artist encounters a snake, heart-shaped, then encircling itself. An ouroboros, a symbol of cyclical transmutation. One hears Spanish superstar Rosália and Lisa (of BLACKPINK, K-Pop über-nova girl group) sing I’m a New Woman—harking alchemical change. Another video—a sci-fi apocalypse film cliché—space refugees leaving Earth on the verge of total war or eco-disaster. A twist: calamity yet calm. A third video “vision” of morphing trees and magma: spirituality with nature. But it also evokes the mindf*ck sequence of buildings bending topsy-turvy in Christopher Nolan’s 2010 blockbuster Inception. The work spans the Dao de Jing, low-fi sci-fi (CGI animations), and decolonial, queer feminist theories. The arbors and anacondas reconfigure Eden, Cartesian Enlightenment, and Buddha’s enlightenment under a Bodhi tree, fingertips to earth.
An earthy, etched mirrored-brass circle functions as a symbolic solar portal. Viewers encounter their reflections: reexamine yourself. Beyond another mirror’s lunar surface, a film reveals Lê in a ritual performance: trance and endurance. A sword pierces through their tongue and cheek—blood. In many cultures, shamans who have a strong calling often have mysterious physical (and/or mental) illnesses until they undergo initiation—căn, or spiritual aptitude. Initiated shamans/spirit mediums (hầu bóng—“serving shadows/reflections”) stride physical and metaphysical realms. Here, the artist embodies Saint Trần, AKA Vietnamese national hero Trần Hưng Đạo—who drove out invading Mongols in the 13th century—now drives out possessing entities. V-Pop Demon Hunter™ or vessel, the body channels spiritual forces.
Force or farce—humor, cultural commentary—also appears. Channel or Chanel? Expansive windows are vinyl-latticed: Buddhist swastikas and the Fendi fashionista logo frame Việt Namaste™. This trademarked term (pending) merges spirituality, global branding, and street culture in Việt Nam, which produces mega-fashion, including “faké” designer goods. Lê collapses distinctions between cults and couture, the material and the immaterial. Another glittery window installation evokes papel picado, Tibetan prayer flags, and dreams that lead to breakthrough science: Nobel laureate Dr. James Watson’s 1953 dream of intertwined snakes (the DNA sequence) and chemist August Kekulé’s 1861 dream of an ouroboros (the benzene structure). Equivalences emerge. Visual and verbal puns abound (e.g., twin readymades: a moving dolly [“Dolly Llama”] and a balikbayan shipping box [“Dolly Carton”]). The artist links catechism and consumption, faith and shifting (geopolitical) fashions. Dyads divide us. What is real, faithful, and what is inauthentic—false? What do possession, dispossession, and being self-possessed truly mean?
This exhibition invites viewers to read meaningful messages in everyday life. The artist urges us to find the divine within the everyday, and within themselves—divination and a “diva nation.” Lê suggests that beyond ritual, prophecy and poesy are also a way of perceiving the world and self—mundane and magical.
– Rhys Munro, Residencies and Exhibitions Manager
