« Listen, the world breathes beneath the surface »

Born in 1995 in Ho Chi Minh City and a graduate of the Villa Arson, the artist grew up between Vietnam and France—two territories, two breaths of the world that have profoundly shaped her relationship to matter, landscape, and the sensitive rhythms of existence. From this dual anchoring emerges a painting that belongs to no fixed ground, but instead circulates, like water, between forms and memories.

In this solo exhibition, Juliette Kiều Mi Châu invites us into a descent. Her canvases evoke ocean depths—threshold worlds where light dissolves and forms waver between appearance and disappearance. Mycelia, hyphae, networks, membranes, filaments—these forms offer themselves to the gaze without ever becoming fixed. Yet this organic, underwater world is only another surface to be traversed: it is a metaphor, an invitation to turn inward. Like the landscapes of Romanticism—those horizons inhabited by the sublime—Juliette Kiều Mi Châu’s paintings transform the outside into an interior space. Nature is not a backdrop here; it is a state of being, a mapping of the invisible relationships that constitute us.

The gaze finds here spaces in which to rest. Whites, painted silences, breaths within the composition. The artist makes room on the paper for emptiness—for what emerges without imposing itself—aware that it is within this interval that the viewer can enter, inhabit the work, and recognize themselves within it.

From one canvas to another, interlacings circulate—lines that coil, collide, and unravel without ever truly breaking. These networks weave a subterranean dialogue between the works: a shared grammar of resistance, passage, and recomposition. They do dance, certainly—but a dance that knows friction: that of bodies and minds grappling with what hinders, slows, and compresses. These traces may well be what our lives draw through time: paths that stumble, diverge, and begin again.

Her painting is an inhabited milieu, traversed by flows and memory. Forms are not represented; they emerge, born from gesture, moving and transforming. The canvas becomes a site of passage—a space where a world is always in the process of emerging, always in the act of breathing.

One leaves the exhibition with the strange sensation of having, for a brief moment, heard something beating beneath the surface of the world.

Théo Bellanger, artistic agent