A LUMINOUS FOREST: Transforming Public Spaces into Shared Art
October 2025 marked a quiet but seismic shift in Hanoi’s public realm when Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen unveiled ‘A Luminous Forest’ in a central urban park. Far from another ornamental fixture, the installation turns collective memory into a living, breathing encounter. It sidesteps the frozen authority of traditional monuments and instead assembles an abstract constellation of light that pulses with the city’s own rhythm. Metal, glass, ceramics, illumination, and subtle sound weave together to enrich the urban landscape, inviting art, nature, and everyday life into a renewed conversation.
At the heart of the work stand eighteen mirror-polished stainless-steel columns, each rising twelve meters and hand-welded into a perfect twelve-meter circle. Visitors do not merely observe; they enter, move through, and complete the piece. The steel’s severity is tempered by delicate interventions rooted in Vietnam’s craft legacy: mouth-blown glass blossoms, hand-thrown ceramic forms, stainless-steel doves, and spinning pinwheels. Rigidity meets fluidity, industrial precision meets ancestral touch, and the result is a visual cadence that shifts with sunlight, weather, and human motion. In Tia’s hands, light is never decoration; it is the vital medium, refracting through glass, skating across metal, and conjuring a forest that feels both solid and spectral.
The making of the forest spanned thousands of hours and unfolded as a deliberate act of reverence for manual skill in an age of mechanized dominance. Tia worked shoulder-to-shoulder with master welders, ceramicists, glassblowers, and floral artisans, preserving Vietnam’s artisanal patrimony while folding it into the global language of contemporary practice. Engineered to withstand Hanoi’s relentless sun, monsoon downpours, and gusting winds, the installation stands as resilient testimony to human dexterity, every weld seam and vitreous petal a signature of singular and collective labor. Building on the momentum of her earlier 2025 commission, ‘Resurrection’, completed at the end of April and featured in designboom magazine, ‘A Luminous Forest’ represents Tia’s second major public art in Hanoi this year. The two projects together signal a broader evolution in the capital’s approach to renewal: moving beyond cosmetic greening toward deeper cultural and social resonance. Public art is no longer peripheral; it has become a vital layer of the city’s civic and spiritual fabric, cultivating local identity, fostering belonging, and injecting fresh energy into Hanoi’s creative life.
all images courtesy of Tia-Thuy Nguyen
The Forest as Conceptual Anchor: Art Symbolism and Innovation
The conceptual seed of art lies in Vietnam’s primordial forests, which are places of refuge, sustenance, and communal endurance across centuries of history. The steel columns do not mimic trees; they allegorize aggregated vitality and quietly evoke the revolutionary image of a hundred banners raised in unison. Inside the circle, industrial starkness collides with handcrafted softness, opacity with gleam, producing an ever-changing visual rhythm. More than a sculpture, ‘A Luminous Forest’ is a restorative overture. It radiates shared memory through light and human proximity, proposing a fresh archetype for Vietnamese public art: anchored in historiography yet fluent in global contemporaneity. Memory here is freed from the archive; it remains luminous, vital, and continuously remade by the daily gaze of passersby.
Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen’s Public Art trajectory is anchored in nature, energy, and urban artistic flow. In recent years, Tia’s public work has gravitated toward nature, energy, and the fluid currents of city life. Forests recur as emblems of resilience and collective narrative; light serves as a dynamic medium to animate shared space. By collaborating with traditional artisans, she safeguards Vietnam’s craft heritage against industrial erosion while positioning art as a regenerative force, nurturing identity, reconnecting people with the natural world, and syncing with metropolitan tempo.
A Luminous Forest’ introduces a new public installation in a central Hanoi park
the project transforms collective memory into an evolving spatial experience
the installation reinforces public art as a growing part of the city’s civic landscape
visitors move through the twelve-meter ring, completing the work through their presence
eighteen mirror-polished stainless-steel columns form the circular structure
reflections shift across the steel surfaces as sunlight and weather change
hand-thrown ceramic forms are integrated into the installation’s vertical structure
stainless-steel doves and pinwheels introduce movement within the composition
the installation adapts to the natural rhythm of the city’s daily cycles
material contrasts create a dialogue between rigidity and softness
light refracts through glass components, generating a layered visual effect
mouth-blown glass elements reference Vietnam’s traditional craft techniques
the project foregrounds Vietnam’s artisanal heritage within a contemporary framework
project info:
name: A Luminous Forest
designer: Tia Thuy Nguyen | @tia.thuynguyen
location: Hanoi, Vietnam
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.
edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom
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