picks March 23, 2023

Yee I-Lann

How much of our perception of the world is shaped by the way we measure it? Is there ever an adequate measurement for affection? These are among the questions one grapples with in Yee I-Lann’s exhibition “Allom! Amatai! Allom!,” one of a series or five concurrent events timed to coincide with the artist’s traveling survey “Borneo Heart.” The gallery show gathers three photomedia essays stemming from Yee’s recent collaborations with Bajau Laut weavers and other Bornean Indigenous communities. The first, “rasa saying”, 2014–21, manifests as a constellation of dye-sublimation prints on navy-tinted

picks February 22, 2023

Mit Jai Inn

Mit Jai Inn’s exhibition “Dreamday” continues the Impressionists’ quest to transmit the quintessential translucence of light and color onto canvas. In addition to indulging in a little material alchemy (the artist combines oil paint with gypsum powder, color pigments, silver and even glitter to give his palette its magical, almost eerie glow), Mit releases his paintings from traditional restrictive frames so that their surfaces no longer hang docile and deflated on the wall. In Dream Tunnel, 2021, the canvas forms an archway suspended from the ceiling; viewers can enter its underbelly and inspect

picks January 23, 2023

Nguyễn Quốc Dũng

Nguyễn Quốc Dũng’s oil-on-canvas paintings record the intricate mesh of quotidian intimacies among the people who dwell on the margins of Ho Chi Minh City. The artist provokes subtle confrontations by foregrounding often “invisible” subjects, such as transgender sex workers and migrant laborers.

The exhibition “The Lives of Others” derives from Nguyễn’s continued interest in depicting these oft-sidelined individuals within their most personal settings. In Transgender life, 2017, two life-size nude figures emerge through an intermittent flow of flesh-toned microstrokes atop broad swabs of pastel

picks January 18, 2023

Hà Mạnh Thắng

Hà Mạnh Thắng is drawn to the succinct expressiveness of Chinese Tang poetry: With just a handful of carefully chosen verses, one can conjure mountaintops perforating a sea of clouds or whispers of a river trickling beneath apricot blooms. In the exhibition “Kìa non non, nước nước, mây mây” (“Behold the land, the water, the clouds,” a verse taken from the Nguyễn Dynasty poet Chu Mạnh Trinh), the artist attempts to distill onto silk and canvas the essence of ancient landscapes, using the pictorial language of abstraction. Applying an eclectic combination of materials—ranging from acrylic and

picks December 29, 2022

Le Quoc Thanh

Nestled in a high-rise where the terrestrial detachment induces a lightness of being, the exhibition “Parcours” spirals into artist Le Quoc Thanh’s ongoing quest to find sacredness in our mundane world. Born in post-1975 Vietnam, Le entered the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 1994, a time when Socialist Realism was entrenched as the dominant aesthetic ideology. Finding himself at a stalemate within the educational system, Le dropped out and turned his attention to movements outside the country. He was particularly fascinated by Abstract Expressionism, whose bold adherence to form

Hung Duong