Exhibition «Lần nữa, mãi mãi» (Again, Forever)

   Seven people born in the same year bring in their most recent work, most of it scattered experiments that have only now found room to take shape. A small gallery in central Hanoi gives those pieces space to stand next to each other for the first time.

   The group is Đặng Thuỳ Anh, Chiêu Dương, Phạm Minh Hiếu, Vũ Diệu Hương, Trịnh Cẩm Nhi, Lê Hoàng Nam Phương and Thảo Bùi, all born in 1996. The works span painting, sculpture, video and installation, and converge on a single gesture: gathering and then excavating memory. An image that keeps returning, a lingering feeling without clear shape, or thoughts held close about a person, a place, a past experience.

   Each of them moves at a different rhythm. Vũ Diệu Hương distils hazy memories of hardship within her family into the image of three small candles enclosed in a large one. Thảo Bùi turns the camera toward the shifting gaze between himself and his father. Đặng Thuỳ Anh sketches and writes about the sweet gloom she carries, while Trịnh Cẩm Nhi paints the quiet intimacy of words not yet spoken. Chiêu Dương uses lacquer to excavate butterfly-shaped artefacts in an attempt to grasp the spiritual realm. Lê Hoàng Nam Phương explores how visual systems observe, remember and imagine, through paintings of a peculiar cemetery near her home. Phạm Minh Hiếu, through reflection and selection, contemplates the self and time unfolding with no beginning or end.

   A few things worth knowing:

• — seven artists of one generation, all born the same year
• — four media running in parallel: painting, sculpture, video, installation
• — the curatorial text was written by two of the participating artists themselves

   It suits anyone following Hanoi's younger artists, and viewers who like a room private enough to stay with one work for a while. The question the group puts is blunt enough: what do thirty years mean when childhood still feels this close.

   If you want to know what the class of 1996 is thinking about, this is a compact and honest cross-section.