Scooter parts wound up as mirrors at Gear7 in Paris

Four mirrors hung in a row on a white wall, each framed in the sticker-wrapped bodywork of a scooter: flames, shards and racing stripes in orange, lime and blue. Farther along, nine oval mirrors sat between pairs of black panels. That is what Lea Kika Sblandano's installation photographs record of Gear7, which ran Sept. 17 to 20 at Not Today, a Paris space at 23 rue Le Peletier kept by the digital studio Parc.

Gear7 belongs to three designers: Alex Sinh Nguyen, Quang Vinh Nguyen and Gabriel Hafner. Over research stays in Ho Chi Minh City in 2024 and 2025 they worked with local fabricators, artisans and riders to turn motorbike components into domestic objects, and the announcement billed Paris as the project's first European showing. The wider collections include a chair assembled from Honda saddles and a bench that keeps its beaded seat cover.

In August we wrote about the crucifix USB necklace that carries Alex Sinh Nguyen's game for Barragán. The Lausanne designer's site describes a practice of "creation systems that borrow from video game logic," and most of the commissions are mods: Mowalola's skate decks swapped into Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Rohan Mirza's garments fitted onto the characters of Guitar Hero World Tour, a Barragán collection set loose inside Prey. Each replaces a stock asset and leaves the system running.

Gear7 reads to me as the same move made with a welder. The site files the Vietnam work under tuning culture, which is modding by another name: a mass-produced machine and a street full of people who will not leave it stock. When we asked in 2014 whether modding was a dying art, Robert Yang told us Unity was drawing would-be modders away. It did not die. It left the screen.

The Paris run is over. Quang Vinh Nguyen has also posted a Gear7 table and shelf, tires and a brake-disc lazy Susan included, built for the Seeson store in Ho Chi Minh City.