"October 2025 marked a quiet but seismic shift in realm when Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen unveiled 'A Luminous Forest' in a central urban park. Far from another ornamental fixture, the installation turns collective memory into a living, breathing encounter. It sidesteps the frozen authority of traditional monuments and instead assembles an abstract constellation of light that pulses with the city's own rhythm. Metal, , , illumination, and subtle weave together to enrich the urban landscape, inviting art, nature, and everyday life into a renewed conversation."
"At the heart of the work stand eighteen -polished stainless- columns, each rising twelve meters and hand-welded into a perfect twelve-meter circle. Visitors do not merely observe; they enter, move through, and complete the piece. The steel's severity is tempered by delicate interventions rooted in Vietnam's craft legacy: mouth-blown glass blossoms, hand-thrown ceramic forms, stainless-steel doves, and spinning pinwheels. Rigidity meets fluidity, industrial precision meets ancestral touch, and the result is a visual cadence that shifts with sunlight, weather, and human motion."
"The making of the forest spanned thousands of hours and unfolded as a deliberate act of reverence for manual skill in an age of mechanized dominance. Tia worked shoulder-to-shoulder with master welders, ceramicists, glassblowers, and floral artisans, preserving Vietnam's artisanal patrimony while folding it into the global language of contemporary practice. Engineered to withstand Hanoi's relentless sun, monsoon downpours, and gusting winds, the installation stands as resilient testimony to human dexterity, every weld seam and vitreous petal a signature of singular and collective labor."
October 2025 unveiling transformed a central urban park into an interactive installation that converts collective memory into a living encounter. Eighteen polished stainless-steel columns rise twelve meters in a perfect circle, encouraging visitors to enter and move through the work. Traditional Vietnamese crafts—mouth-blown glass blossoms, hand-thrown ceramics, stainless-steel doves, and spinning pinwheels—soften industrial steel and integrate ancestral touch. Light functions as a primary medium, refracting through glass and scintillating across metal to create a spectral, pulsing forest. The project required thousands of hours and collaboration with master artisans and was engineered to endure Hanoi's sun, monsoon, and winds.
Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine
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