Exhibition «Ai vịt đây, tôi bán vịt cho?» (Who'll Buy My Ducks?)

   A rubber duck is not the obvious guide to a show about childhood, folk culture and a city rebuilding itself — yet that is the job it does here. For the past two years the toy has been the recurring protagonist in the paintings of a Hanoi artist, and you can now see where that has led, in a small art space on Hàng Bông, a short walk west of Hoàn Kiếm Lake.

   Nguyễn Huy Anh Tuấn, who signs his work Tuan Overdose, has spent over eight years on painting and studied at Trường Đại học Mỹ thuật Công nghiệp, Hanoi's university of industrial fine arts. He treats art as a form of meditation — a place to find inner peace and give an honest voice to the subconscious — and works at the intersection of abstraction and surrealism, turning childhood memories, dreams and everyday observation into layered visual stories.

   The rubber duck is no decorative flourish. Tuấn reads it as a metaphor for latent strength and endurance: the innate ability to return to its original form after every impact. Through it he tells stories of childhood, reflects on Vietnamese folk culture and looks at a Hanoi that changes by the day — a city where, amid constant transformation, older values quietly endure in collective memory and emotion.

   The title helps too, once you have it: «Ai vịt đây, tôi bán vịt cho?» is phrased as a street hawker's cry — a vendor asking passers-by who will buy his ducks.

   If you follow contemporary Vietnamese painting, or simply want an unhurried break with art between Old Quarter errands, this is an easy stop: the room is small, so the canvases are read at arm's length. The venue has also announced that the artist himself comes over for a coffee on Thursdays — no hours are given, so treat it as a chance rather than a promise.

   «At times, it is not new materials or techniques, but personal ways of seeing and lived experience that determine the depth and vitality of an artwork,» Tuấn says.

   Studio 13 - Culture Hub & Art Space describes itself as a music and art venue, and acoustic evenings run here as well. The space is genuinely compact — its own hosts say so — which is why this feels closer to a living room hung with paintings than to a gallery hall.

   Come on a quiet weekday if you want the pictures to yourself, or in the evening, when Hàng Bông switches its signs on.