Born in 1967 in Paris. Lives and works in Avignon, France.
Betty Bui literally works from 2D to 3D. She plays with appearances, opens a dialogue on representation and its illusions. Influenced by Pop imagery and Minimal Art, she transposes image into space. While breaking down our production modes, she goes one step further in the make-believe, by embodying the subject. Her mode of production plays with our sense of perception. Her work is smooth, often monochrome and has the capacity to question the objectivity of our viewpoint...
Betty Bui's main concern is precisely the way we see things, and is the starting point and inspiration of her work. She acts on it by making simple changes of scale, plan or by inverting the viewpoint...
Although her body of work might seem formalist, her concern does not reside in the production of objects but rather in the creation/invention of spaces. She creates objects which presumably answer the public's expectations, but are precisely unsettling and take him away to a world closer to Lewis Carroll's than Donald Judd's.
The question of "seeing" opens heaps of playful possibilities, especially when the public is surprised, startled and disoriented... Only then can appear giant footprints floating on water or on grass, stylized pornographic images on a card game... the consonance of a Spanish word: "exprimir"? (to squeeze) and a French verb: "s'exprimer" (to say, to voice), is the origin of her squeezer, a public bench inviting passers-by to sit down and have chat.
The objects she imagines play with themselves, with the image they give to others to better fool them. Space is not there to control or prove right. Far from the relativist theory which stipulates that reality dissolves in its own representations, Betty Bui creates with humour, a space for freedom.
"Une pragmatique de l'illusion, Betty Bui" Lea Gauthier, in Mouvement, July-September 2001