A story told, a happy memory rekindled, a flower called by name – all gently come together in Hoa Tay, an art project by French artist Karine Bonneval during her two-month residency in Ho Chi Minh City.

By chromatography on paper, Karine Bonneval meticulously captures the seemingly fragile yet deeply rooted connections between people and the world of plants, set against the backdrop of a modern city.

“I grew up in the Mekong Delta, in a small village in the countryside next to the river, and we navigate everything in our life along the river. Along the river bank, there's always wild aquatic plants that can be edible – like water hyacinth, a plant that has become a cultural part of our memory…”

It was one of the stories shared by Vietnamese participants of the project, featured as an audio recording accompanying the artworks at Karine Bonneval’s Hoa Tay exhibition, held in late July in Ho Chi Minh City.

At the exhibition, Karine presented 25 wind chimes she handcrafted using Vietnamese clay, more than half of which carry stories of flowers rooted in Vietnamese memory.

Tell me your story with flowers

Back in June, Bonneval arrived in Ho Chi Minh City to carry out her project through Villa Saigon, an art residency program that provides logistical and financial support to artists who are either French nationals or living in France, with the aim of fostering artistic dialogue between France and Vietnam.

For nearly a month, the artist invited people living in Ho Chi Minh City to take part in her project by sharing a personal story connected to a flower they cherished.

In each 30-minute conversation, the artist sat across from them, quietly listening as memories unfolded and emotions were gently expressed – through stories of water hyacinths, Sesbania flowers, flamboyant blossoms, magnolia, and more.

Those emotions became the material for Karine Bonneval to craft the wind chimes, with the bell domes shaped from Vietnamese clay, inspired by the petals in each story.

The chime tails were made from delicate strips of paper, where the colors of the flowers were imprinted by means of chromatography on paper, a technique invented in the 1950s, before today's electronic devices, to analyze soil quality and components such as fungi, minerals, proteins, and more in the soil.

Although she drew from an old methodology, it took the artist months of experimenting with papers, materials, weights, and proportions to see how it could work on pollen and petals, turning it into an original creation that is fully part of her artistic practice.

With the Hoa Tay project, Karine Bonneval worked with her chromatography technique to reveal the hidden pigments within each flower petal.

It’s a process that is both scientific and artistic, she explained.

First, the artist soaked finely chopped flower petals in a special solution, then filtered out the solid parts and kept the liquid infused with the flower’s essence.

She then dipped a piece of specially treated paper which is coated with a diluted silver nitrate solution, a light-sensitive compound that helps fix colors when exposed to sunlight, into the mixture.

Over the course of about 50 minutes, the pigments from the solution slowly spread across the paper.

The paper was then left to dry under the sun for a week, allowing the colors to fully stabilize.

The result was a series of one-of-a-kind “flower portraits,” as Bonneval calls them, where layers of color, patterns, and shades reveal the unique chemical components of each flower.

“What is special about this is that every flower creates a different range of colors and patterns,” Bonneval said.

“And the same species of flower that is growing in different places, for instance, could make different colors as well because the soil and the quality of the water and many different factors can influence the color of the chromatography.”

A sunlit room on the third floor of a French-era house in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City became Karine Bonneval’s creative studio, where she carefully processed each flower petal, mixed chemical solutions, and shaped the clay to craft every wind chime by hand.

Each piece in the project took considerable time to complete, as in addition to processing the flower petals, Karine also worked with clay and had each chime fired twice.

Yet for her, the slow and meticulous process, which stretched over several days for each work, allowed her to adapt her pace and reconnect with nature.

“For me, using handcrafted techniques is very important,” Karine Bonneval shared. “It's a good way for us, those very contemporary beings in a very speedy life, to take time to align ourselves with the rhythm of plants, which move much more slowly than we do.”

“In large cities, it's easy to feel disconnected from the plant world,” she added.

“Yet plants are essential to our lives – they provide oxygen, shade, nourishment, and healing.

“Through this, I hope to gently remind the audience of these vital, intimate connections.

“It's an invitation to reawaken our awareness of the natural world, even in dense urban environments.”

In addition to working on flowers from the stories shared by city residents, Karine Bonneval also wandered around various neighborhoods, gathering fallen flowers for her project.

It’s a way for her to explore and connect with the city she was temporarily living in, Bonneval said.

Trip to Vietnam: right time, right place, right people

This wasn’t Karine Bonneval’s first time collecting flowers and memories for her work.

For the past ten years, the artist has been developing a larger project called Memory with Plants and Flowers, which she has carried out in various places and most recently in Quebec, Canada, two years ago.

Bonneval graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts d'Angoulème (National School of Fine Arts in Angoulême) and the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg (Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts) in France.

Her projects often involve collaborations with renowned scientific institutions such as the Institute for Diversity, Ecology, and Evolution of Life (IDEEV) and Cornell University (USA), aiming to explore new ways for humans to engage with nature and the living world.

Her work has been widely exhibited in countries including France, Germany, the U.S., and Argentina.

The artist, born in 1970, said she had long wanted to visit Vietnam, but felt that coming as a tourist would not give her the opportunity to truly connect with or understand the local people.

It wasn’t until she came across the Villa Saigon residency program by the French Institute in Vietnam that she decided to give it a try, and was selected.

“Vietnamese people have a strong traditional connection to flowers, especially during Tet (Lunar New Year) celebrations and ancestral tributes. These rituals reveal a unique cultural relationship to plants, quite different from those I’ve encountered in Europe,” Karine Bonneval explained why she carried out the Hoa Tay project in Vietnam, a country which is home to many well-known flower-growing villages.

In contrast, she noted, many flowers sold in France are often imported from other countries.

“My intuition was that this deep attention to flowers is ingrained in the Vietnamese collective memory,” she added.

“In a fast-growing and highly urbanized city like Ho Chi Minh City, I was curious to explore whether this bond still resonates as strongly as it does in more rural or traditional areas.”

Another thing that fascinated the French artist was discovering that Vietnamese has a term, hoa tay which literally means 'flower hands'.

In Vietnamese, hoa tay refers to the loop-shaped patterns on the fingertips, a type of fingerprint. Having more hoa tay is believed to indicate greater artistic or creative talent.

The phrase coincidentally fits perfectly with how Karine Bonneval crafts each wind chime by hand.

“Inspiration comes like that,” she said. “It's about what you are, what you are working on, and about your mind making all the little connections between all these facts and pushing you to do it.”

Each wind chime carries not only the storyteller’s memories but also the many layers of emotions from the artist who crafted it.

Bonneval said she was deeply moved by the memories people shared with her.

“I’ve been collecting stories related to plants for over ten years. This time, the Hoa Tay project deepened my understanding of how ecological and cultural dimensions intertwine in urban environments,” she said.

“The experience helped me refine the ways I approach memory, biodiversity, and transmission through sensory, poetic forms.

“Indirectly, this project reinforced my desire to work in the art and science field, while staying grounded in community-based practices.”

After the project finished in Vietnam, the Hoa Tay wind chimes – crafted from flowers, clay, and Vietnamese emotional connection – journeyed home with Bonneval to France, with the hope of one day being showcased in an international exhibition.