Nomadic Spring

“I gathered a spring and told a child”

In the silence of her studio, left hand gripping the paper, Karine let herself be guided by a child. A child-ancestor from 12th-century Mongolia, who came to show her rites and beliefs, and to reveal the intimate links between life and death, birth and war, teeth and stars.

From this encounter emerges Nomadic Spring. At Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg, the artist unfolds a cosmogony woven from textiles. Here, garments are no longer “functional” but “revelatory” — vessels of souls and stories. Far from pastoral clichés, the work radiates a telluric force: a sacred tension between what fades and what emerges.

Inspired by a hypnagogic vision of a “river of ancestors,” Karine lets her hands converse. The right hand, skilled in weaving, vegetal dyes, and embroidery, anchors the work in noble, ancestral materiality. The left, liberated through automatic drawing under the child’s guidance, becomes the vessel for an invisible narrative. Together, they shape objects of living memory, where matter grounds the ethereal.

From The Child’s Fire — a rite of bone transformation — to The Father’s Monumental Coat, a sun-colored architectural refuge, each piece is a threshold, an invitation to hear the whispers of incarnated fibers. Embroidered headdresses honor the skulls; shoes in wooden boxes speak of attachment to the earth.

This journey tells us — like a young shoot emerging from soil — of a vertical nomadism: a passage that unfolds not only through landscapes but across states of being.

Within this Parisian setting, the artist invites a ritual pause. She asks us to encounter the object as one encounters a friend: with time, humility, and attention, so that in the secret of the fibers, absence becomes presence.

Presence that reminds us: death is not an end, but the humus from which life arises.

Exhibition in the hotel windows, lobby, and entrance.

Karine N’guyen Van Tham

Born 1988, Marseille — lives and works in central Brittany. Graduate of École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Marseille, trained in upholstery weaving, then self-taught textile weaver. Her practice, at the crossroads of textile sculpture, drawing, and writing, explores the object as vessel of memory and sacredness.

Awarded the Brittany Creation Prize (2017) and the European Young Creation Prize (2024). In 2024, she participates in the 60th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani (Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro). Exhibited in galleries across France and Europe, she continues her research on the phenomenology of absence from her Breton studio

Discover the artist

Gesture, Matter, and Extended Time

Beyond its poetic and artistic dimension, Printemps Nomade engages a contemporary reflection on the responsibility of gesture and perception. Karine N’Guyen Van Tham’s practice is rooted in a rare attentiveness to extended time, to the precision of gesture, and to a deep respect for matter and nature. Her textile works, conceived as sculptures, question the very function of clothing: far from the logics of fashion and consumption, it becomes protection, sign, and form of sacrality, where use gives way to meaning and permanence.

Each piece is entirely handcrafted, using natural and locally sourced materials—silk, Normandy linen, and wool from her atelier’s nearby flocks—dyed by the artist with plant-based pigments, then woven on old looms patiently restored. This process, deeply anchored in archaic craftsmanship, restores clothing to a primary dimension: cultural, symbolic, and ritual.

Within this approach, the exhibition resonates with a more essential vision of luxury: that of a reclaimed sense of time, a respected materiality, and a practice that privileges duration over ephemerality, meaning over fashion. Printemps Nomade thus invites a reflection on our relationship to the world and to the living.