FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY MEETS CONTEMPORARY ART

While Hua has become internationally recognised through collaborations with luxury fashion houses including Dior, Maison Margiela, Kenzo and Gucci, Of Walking on Fire demonstrates how far her practice has evolved beyond commercial image-making.

Originally trained in fashion photography, Hua developed a distinctive visual language characterised by surreal compositions, theatrical staging and uncanny symbolism. Rather than abandoning these aesthetic foundations, she has redirected them toward increasingly introspective concerns.

In her contemporary art practice, fashion's constructed realities become a vehicle for exploring identity, migration and inherited memory. The polished image gives way to emotional archaeology.

This transition from fashion photographer to multidisciplinary contemporary artist has positioned Hua among a new generation of image-makers who challenge the boundaries between editorial photography, fine art and personal storytelling.

THE FEMININE AS A SITE OF RENEWAL

If the exhibition's first gallery explores rupture and absence, the second turns toward healing.

Created specifically for Autograph, a new body of commissioned work examines maternal lineage through the lens of Đạo Mẫu, the Vietnamese spiritual tradition centred on Mother Goddess worship. Revered female deities associated with Earth, Water and Mountains become symbolic guides through questions of ancestry, resilience and belonging.

At the centre of the installation is Little Super in Versailles – Archive from the year '88, a newly commissioned work that imagines a young girl carrying the emotional weight of inherited family rituals and intergenerational memory.

Here, Hua reconsiders the women who shaped her life—mother, grandmother and self—not as distant figures in a family history, but as active participants in a continuing narrative.

The exhibition poses a poignant question: when language fails, what forms of connection remain?

For Hua, the answer appears to lie in images, rituals and acts of care passed quietly from one generation to the next.

A VITAL VOICE WITHIN CONTEMPORARY DIASPORIC ART

At a moment when conversations around migration, identity and cultural memory continue to shape contemporary art discourse, Of Walking on Fire offers an important contribution to how diasporic experiences are represented.

Rather than framing displacement solely through trauma, Hua explores its subtler emotional textures: inherited silences, fragmented recollections and the creative possibilities that emerge when certainty remains out of reach.

Her photographs resist fixed narratives, allowing contradiction and ambiguity to coexist. In doing so, they reflect the realities of many second-generation immigrant experiences, where identity is often formed through incomplete histories and imagined connections to the past.

For London audiences, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity to engage with one of the most distinctive contemporary voices emerging from the Vietnamese diaspora today.