Axel Huynh-Perez

Axel Huynh-Perez is a French painter, video artist and music producer of Vietnamese and Sephardic origin who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024.

His practice focuses on the representation of mental phenomena such as remembering, forgetting, dreaming and hallucination, drawing on his personal histories and the cultural specificities of his family. He treats family photographs as objects of study, freezing moments of life in his paintings and giving the people depicted a form of timelessness.

For him, the representation of the deceased becomes an obsession, a ritual of remembrance, a way of paying homage and reactivating memories. As a person of mixed heritage, Axel Huynh-Perez incorporates the notion of mixing into his work, contributing to the emergence of a third culture. For example, he revisits the Vietnamese tradition of the funeral altar, paying homage to members of his family.

His works, whether portraits of the dead or the living, deconstruct the continuity of time, blurring the boundaries between past and present, between the world of the dead and that of the living.

The washes and glazes he uses refer to the degradation of photographic and filmic traces, evoking the erasure and oblivion of family and colonial histories.