In October 2025, artist Tia-Thủy Nguyễn unveils the public artwork “Unity” in a central urban park. The installation transforms collective memory into a contemporary spatial experience, transcending the conventional monumentality of static sculpture to emerge as an abstract constellation of light. Through the interplay of metal, glass, ceramics, illumination, and sound, “The Forest” enriches the urban landscape, infusing it with poetic resonance and offering a renewed dialogue between art, nature, and the city’s everyday rhythms.

The conceptual genesis of the artwork derives from the archetype of Vietnam’s primordial forests. These have served as sanctuaries of concealment, sources of sustenance, and emblems of communal resilience across the nation’s historical continuum. Eighteen stainless-steel columnar forms, meticulously hand-welded and mirror-polished, stand configured in a circular array of twelve-meter diameter. These metallic elements eschew naturalistic replication and function as allegories of aggregated vitality. They resonate with the revolutionary motif of a hundred banners aloft while engendering an immersive domain. Here the observer enters, perceives, and integrates into the composition. 

Intricately wrought artisanal interventions temper the austere steel planes. Mouth-blown glass blossoms, hand-crafted ceramics, and stainless-steel doves and pinwheels converge in a harmonious ensemble drawn from Vietnam’s long-standing craft traditions. The interplay of rigidity and suppleness, industrial precision and ancestral making, luminosity and opacity produces an ever-shifting visual cadence. Each material refracts light in its own distinct manner, turning the circular composition into a kinetic prism that responds to sunlight, time, and movement. Within Tia-Thủy Nguyễn’s oeuvre, light transcends mere spectacle to become an essential medium, coursing through glass strata, gliding across metal surfaces, and giving rise to a mutable forest of radiance that feels at once corporeal and ethereal.

Fabrication encompassed thousands of hours and exemplifies a profound veneration of manual craftsmanship amidst industrial hegemony. The artist engaged directly in every phase, collaborating with master artisans: welders of metal, ceramicists, glassblowers, and floral composers. This symbiotic endeavor safeguards traditional patrimony while assimilating Vietnamese artisanal prowess into the international continuum of contemporary practice. Every articulation, from weld seams to vitreous petals, crystallizes erudition and human dexterity, simultaneously singular and collective. The work thus endures in material tenacity and spiritual permanence. It withstands Hanoi’s inclement milieu, a metropolis wherein temporal flux, solar intensity, precipitation, and gusts perpetually assay anthropogenic constructs. 

The installation of "Unity" marks a significant turning point in Hanoi’s approach to urban renewal. The city is moving beyond surface-level beautification toward interventions that carry deeper cultural and social resonance. Public art has become an essential layer of the city’s spiritual and civic fabric, where aesthetic expression intertwines with collective memory. These initiatives signal a more enlightened vision, one in which art functions as a regenerative force, nurturing local identity and fostering a renewed sense of urban belonging.

Within this milieu, “Unity” transcends sculptural convention to embody a restorative artistic overture. It irradiates collective recollection through luminescence and human proximity. The installation proffers a nascent archetype for Vietnamese public art. Anchored in historiography yet conversant with global contemporaneity, it liberates remembrance from historical enclosure. Memory remains perpetually effulgent, vital, and reconstituted through the quotidian regard of the populace.