Ly Hoàng Ly is a Ho Chi Minh City-based award-winning poet and multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, sculpture, film, ceramics, book arts, installation and painting. She is also a book editor for Youth Publishing House in Ho Chi Minh City. She received a BFA in Oil Painting from Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 1999 and, with the support of a Fulbright scholarship, an MFA in Sculpture and Interdisciplinary Studies from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, in 2013.

L. H. Ly is the first woman artist in Vietnam to work in a sustained and committed way in the medium of performance art, and one of only a few women artists in the 1990s and 2000s, in the whole of Vietnam, to make audacious and bold statements through their art, often speaking to issues of women’s bodies, sexuality and gender equality. In Monument of Round Trays (various iterations, 2001–2010), the artist created a towering pyramid constructed from the aluminium serving trays traditionally used by wives and mothers to serve food to family members and guests. Four metres high and eight metres wide, the structure resembled a metallic mountain with reflective surfaces that, due to its elastic armature, would sway and tremble according to weather conditions. When a viewer entered the monument they would see, within its interior, hundreds of hanging black-and-white photographs of nude women, and human figures expressing gestures of freedom and liberation painted on the underside of the trays. Ly thus presented a tension between the different kinds of burdens women continue to bear as figures of domesticity and of sexual desire in the era of modernisation and liberalisation in Vietnam. Yet the most powerful animating force for the work was an accompanying performance where L. H. Ly marched furiously around the monument, clanging and clattering due to the trays strapped to and obscuring her body, ultimately entering the structure to try to destroy it from within.

Since 2011, L. H. Ly’s work has begun to focus more on such topics as migration, displacement, community, memory and ecological loss. In the forms of an artist book (2012–2013), two sculptural iterations (2016) and a monumental work of public art (2017), Boat Home Boat conjoins forms signifying water, house and boat together with fragments of text to evoke overlapping symbols of home and journey. Alongside her sculptural work, L. H. Ly remains committed to developing her performance practice, situating the body and artistic objects as mutually activating within socially engaged projects. In response to the news that masses of trees would be cut down in Hanoi and Saigon, the artist enacted participatory durational performances with public installations and documentary films from 2015–2018 that drew on Buddhist practices of mindfulness, such as Hugging trees – Hugging your loved ones – Hugging yourself (2015 and 2016).

Her work has been collected by such institutions as the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Nguyen Art Foundation and M+ Museum.