Across from the Musée Arlaten, tucked quietly into Arles’ historic center, lies the unassuming yet evocative Hôtel de la Lauzière. Closed to the public for over sixty years, this baroque gem will reopen in 2026. But this summer, it opened its doors temporarily to host “Let the Horses Ride” by Nhu Xuan Hua. This exhibition is part of Rencontres d’Arles 2025, when the city transforms into a global photography hub.
Nhu Xuan Hua Creates a Time Portal
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
Stepping inside the mostly untouched Hôtel de la Lauzière feels like entering a time capsule from the 1970s. Faded neon, peeling wallpaper, and retro décor remind us of life prior to social media, when memory lived in photographs, not feeds. This is a rare moment to experience the atmospheric decay of the building before renovations begin.
Installed on the upper floor, Nhu Xuan Hua’s exhibition inhabits the space with dreamlike sensitivity. The Franco-Vietnamese artist, known for exploring themes of identity and diaspora, presents an “emotionally charged tableaux” that merges new photographic compositions with imagery from her family archives. Her distinctive chromatic inversion filters cast a spectral glow over the work, blending fiction, memory, and invention.
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
By choosing to stage this work in a decaying, historically loaded building awaiting transformation, Xuan Hua draws a poignant parallel between physical space and psychological terrain. Just as Hôtel de la Lauzière wears its layers of history on its walls, Xua Hua’s photographs carry the invisible imprints of trauma and love. Both the space and the images speak to what is left behind, and what insists on being remembered.
Xuan Hua also composed a poem, Let the Horses Ride, which serves as the exhibition’s title and conceptual anchor. In it, memory is likened to untamed horses, breaking free from domestication and galloping into creative expression. Her layered visual technique doesn’t overwrite the past, instead, it unearths it, activating buried feelings and fragmented histories. This resonance with Hôtel de la Lauzière’s own scars and layers of history deepens the work’s impact.
The Storied Stie of Hôtel de la Lauzière
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
Renovations are set to begin in 2025, guided by Surface Studio, which is committed to preserving the building’s character. In a time when many restorations erase original features, Hôtel de la Lauzière’s elaborate Baroque façade and sculpted bas-reliefs will remain intact. Rather than smoothing over the past, the project embraces it, inviting visitors to think beyond the sterile white cube and into something more layered and timeless.
Once completed, the first floor will become the permanent home of Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard, one of the exhibition’s presenters. The space will host year-round contemporary art programs, supporting emerging and mid-career artists in a setting where creativity flows through centuries-old walls. Surrounded by the landscapes of Camargue, Crau, and the Alpilles, the site will continue to explore the intersection of nature, history, and art.
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
The founders, Anne-Laure Buffard, Nathaly Capelle, François Gagey, and Jean-Florent Mandelbaum, come from diverse backgrounds spanning law, publishing, ceramics, and curation. Their vision is clear: this will not be a conventional art space. Instead, Hôtel de la Lauzière will serve as a living memory, where the past and present continuously interact, and where history is not preserved behind glass but reactivated through creativity.
Celebrating Rencontres d’Arles
Courtesy of Nhu Xuan Hua.
Arles, a coastal town in the South of France, has long been a cultural crossroads, from Roman ruins to Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, and now to the vanguard of contemporary art. While LUMA and Rencontres d’Arles have brought international acclaim, its small institutions, like Hôtel de la Lauzière, keep the city’s soul alive. Here, restoration means more than just upgrading infrastructure, it means nurturing spirit, memory, and community.
Art is not imposed onto Arles; it rises from within. And in the quiet revival of Hôtel de la Lauzière, a new heartbeat joins the city’s ongoing story.
About Artist Nhu Xuan Hua
Nhu Xuan Hua is a French-Vietnamese photographer and artist based in Paris, working between Paris and London and taking commissions worldwide. She studied art history and cinema before completing in 2011 the photography course at the Auguste Renoir Technical school in Paris. A year later, Nhu Xuan moved to London, where she lived and worked on both national and international commissions for the largest fashion companies such as Dior, Maison Margiela, Kenzo, and Gucci. Her imagery portrays narrative and conceptual visuals where photography occasionally meets mixed media. She shapes each component of the photograph, looking at every object as a tangible matter more than a functional tool. She uses her sets to turn her vision into reality, challenging the limit of the space and the bi-dimensionality of the frame that she fills with fragmented compositions.
Nhu Xuan moved back to Paris in 2021 and is exploring a more multidisciplinary story telling practice on the side of her fashion photography work. She is currently presenting her first solo show “Hug of a swan” at Huis Marseille, the Museum for Photography in Amsterdam (NL) as a retrospective mixing fashion and autonomous works from the past 6 years, enlightening her searching process on displacement of memories and Vietnamese heritage.
Her first publication Tropism, Consequences of a displaced Memory is published by Area Books. Based on archival pictures from her family, the digital intervention interprets these memories through a new angle, exploring the effect of dissipation generated by time passing and driven by the forces of an inherited memory.
