"Chuyển cảnh" (Scene Shift) Exhibition

   Five painters, born nearly twenty years apart, answering the same question: when you paint reality, do you paint what the eye sees or what thought constructs? Their answers hang side by side in the middle of Hoàn Kiếm — and they look nothing alike.

   “Chuyển cảnh” — a scene shift — points here not only to a change of natural landscape but, before that, to the movement inside an artist's thinking as they face reality and try to state it: not the reality the eye registers, but the reality contemplation builds. It traces how the language of painting travels from generalisation to stylisation and on towards abstraction as one continuous flow — and back again, because that two-way drift never stops in a painter's practice.

   The five artists
— Pham Duc Tung (Phạm Đức Tùng), b. 1983 — studied at Hanoi Art College (2002) and the Vietnam University of Fine Arts (2008); works in abstraction
— Truong Van Ngoc (Trương Văn Ngọc), b. 1990 — born in Phú Thọ, graduated from the Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts (2014); spent close to a decade on the lotus in watercolour and has lately been moving into silk painting
— Le Quynh Anh (Lê Quỳnh Anh), b. 1995
— Nguyen Ha My (Nguyễn Hà My), b. 2000
— Ha Minh Thuan (Hà Minh Thuận), b. 2001

   It is for people who look at paintings without needing a wall text, for art students who want five ways of thinking hung in one room, and for anyone tracking the painters born after 1990 — three of the five names here are still very new. You leave with a sharper question rather than a conclusion: between the real and the abstract, where does your own eye stop?

   However different their visual approaches, all five converge on the meeting of nature, memory and the quiet shifts of inner life, with a distinctly East Asian sensibility. The show does not rule on whether figurative or non-figurative wins — each work states its own case to whatever sensitivity the viewer brings.

   Indochine House opened this Tràng Thi space in late 2025 with the exhibition “Ecologies of Mind” and has kept up a steady run of shows since. It sits right beside the Old Quarter, easy to drop into mid-afternoon.

   Every scene shifts eventually, including the one in your head. What do you see?