New York exhibition showcases vibrant Vietnamese contemporary art
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Saturday, May 24, 2025


New York exhibition showcases vibrant Vietnamese contemporary art
Truong Tan, The Hand of God, 2010. Lacquer, 30 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches (80 x 100 cm).



NEW YORK, NY.- Eli Klein Gallery is presenting “Ceci N’est Pas Une Guerre - This Is Not A War,” a group exhibition of 17 Vietnamese artists showcasing 24 works. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the exhibition seeks to challenge the long standing tendency to confine Vietnamese contemporary art within narrow narratives of war, trauma, and survival. Audiences are invited to move beyond inherited narratives and experience the breadth, complexity, and vitality of Vietnamese contemporary art today: unbound, unpredictable, and charged with energy.

The exhibition prompts a reconsideration of how Vietnamese visual culture is presented within a global context. While artists have engaged deeply with the past fifty years of history after the War, their works have often been interpreted through the lens of the aftermath. Within the context of Vietnam's massive economic reforms, the artists critically explore themes of identity, censorship, and queerness. The exhibition focuses on a younger generation of artists who reflect on materiality, memory, and mythology, reimagining self and culture beyond the burden of historical trauma. The exhibition also highlights Vietnamese artists living abroad, particularly in America, France and Germany, whose works address themes of displacement, cultural hybridity, and artistic innovation. Curated by Do Tuong Linh, the show brings together the voices that challenge the notion of “Vietnamese art” as a singular concept, creating a layered dialogue that is poetic and political, introspective and globally engaged.

Emerging in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the implementation of the widespread generation of influential artists responded to history, memory, and the shifting boundaries of identity and expression in deeply personal and resonant ways. Ca Le Thang’s compositionally poetic painting serves as a quiet footnote to the natural and spiritual landscapes of southern Vietnam, expressing a deep emotional connection to his homeland’s nature and history. Through humor and symbolism, Tran Luong retells a traditional Vietnamese legend in a gently narrated yet subtly subversive manner, reflecting the sociopolitical tensions and transformations of early 21st century Vietnam.

Truong Tan, who was considered the first openly gay artist from Vietnam, creates work that is both emblematic and groundbreaking in its exploration of social norms and marginalized identities. Blending historical research with conceptual art not taught in Vietnam’s educational system, Bui Cong Khanh playfully, yet critically, challenges official reward systems by combining porcelain military insignias from multiple nations to question the authority behind medals. Vietnamese lacquer serves as the core medium in Oanh Phi Phi’s practice, through which she explores the transmission of memory, reflections on image theory, and experimental possibilities in scale and technique. Bui Thanh Tam blends the delicate spirit of Vietnamese folk traditions with the bold allure of pop and consumer culture, creating works that are at once challenging, seductive, and provocative.

Building on this historical trajectory, a younger cohort turned toward material experimentation, ironic language, and cross-disciplinary methods to address contemporary social issues, incisively engaging with gender, politics, and cultural memory amid Vietnam’s rapid transformation. Pham Tuan Tu combines elements of primitivism and humor in his work, using refined craftsmanship and a diverse range of materials to delve into the complexities of contemporary society. Nguyen Phuong Linh weaves personal memories into broader cultural contexts, skillfully transforming found objects and materials to reveal the vulnerability of being a woman in Vietnamese society.

Merging political themes with sci-fi aesthetics, Arlette Ǫuynh-Anh Tran constructs nonlinear and absurd narratives of modern history, challenging dominant post–Cold War frameworks surrounding the Global South. Doan Van Toi and Le Hoang Bich Phuong both explore the contemporary rhythms of traditional media. Toi weaves digital pixels into silk and textiles to reflect on the intricate relationship between humans and nature, while Phuong employs delicate silk to blend surrealism with quiet subversion, questioning gender, eccentricity, and societal norms.

Artistic practice continues to expand into the intersections of new media, speculative narratives, and digital processes, reimagining and reconstructing tradition and identity. Vietnamese art now charts a future-oriented sensibility, forging new dialogues and connections between personal experience and global context. My-Lan Hoang-Thuy redefines the relationship between artist and medium, using acrylic drips as a “canvas” to merge painting with personal photography, creating a visual language where intimacy, spontaneity, and imagination intersect. Ha Ninh Pham explores the construction of territories and perception through drawing and sculpture, creating imagined worlds shaped by his unique logic and underlying sense of skepticism. By sewing dyed silk onto canvas, Minh Dung Vu initiates a dialogue between material surface and visual texture, investigating materiality, light, shadow, and perception.

Xuân-Lam Nguyen brings forgotten Vietnamese folk art into contemporary relevance, focusing on Indochinese Orientalist photography and displaced cultural artifacts, blending autobiographical elements with queer identity to construct glitchy, alternative narratives that offer a dynamic commentary on the intersections of identity and history. Anh Thuy Nguyen’s sculptural works explore the relationship between emotional states and the human body. Through digitizing and transforming everyday Vietnamese domestic objects, Van Khanh creates faux-fiber replicas that exist between physical reality and digital dreamscape, reimagining traditions and mythologies within trans narratives.










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