You are invited to celebrate the launch of a new solo exhibition at Autograph's gallery in Spring 2026.
Autograph is developing the first solo exhibition of the French Vietnamese artist Nhu Xuan Hua. The exhibition will span both gallery spaces at our Shoreditch building, featuring newly commissioned work presented for the first time.
Working at the intersection of art and fashion photography, Hua reflects on the fragility of memory and the ways stories are communicated – or withheld – across generations. She reimagines archival photographs from her family’s time in Vietnam, and their early years in Europe, to create dreamlike digitally-altered compositions that shift between recognition and distortion. Across her work, Hua builds elaborate visual reconstructions that echo how memory in the diaspora can splinter, blur and slip from view.
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.
These silences, formed through migration and cultural rupture, reverberate through the diluted contours of bodies in her reworked family photographs, where figures merge and dissolve into one another.
We look forward to welcoming you to Autograph. For more details about visiting, have a look at our Visit Us page, it has information about getting to the gallery, safety and accessibility.
Please note that photography and/or filming will take place at this event. Images from this event may be used by Autograph and external press for marketing and promotional use, including: printed and online publicity, social media, press releases, or other use. If you do not wish to be filmed, please let a member of staff know on the night.
.png)
Banner image: Sunil Gupta, from the series Trespass [detail], 1992-1995. Collection of Autograph, London.
Part of the exhibition image: Sabrina Tirvengadum and Mark Allred, Family [detail], 2023.
Your visit: Photography by Kate Elliott.
Autograph is a space to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.