Duo exhibition «Địa Tầng Ký Ức» (Strata of Memory)

   Twenty-nine ceramic and lacquer works, two makers driven by different impulses, both treating art as excavation: peeling back the strata of memory that lie beneath the surfaces of material and culture. Seeing ceramics and lacquer side by side in one museum space is not a common opportunity here.

   Quang San Art Museum presents the duo show by Vũ Đức Hiếu, also known as Hiếu Mường, and Chu Viết Cường.

   Two directions inside one room:

• — Hiếu Mường explores cultural memory through both ceramics and lacquer, drawing on Mường culture, Vietnam's ethnic minority communities, human imagery and immersive fieldwork
• — Chu Viết Cường uses lacquer to probe the ambiguous territories of personal memory and the contemplative cultural landscapes of northern Vietnam, where time, memory and material gradually settle into one another

   Different as their practices are, they converge on one point: material stops being merely a medium of expression and becomes a repository of memory.

   Worth your time if you want to see traditional Vietnamese materials at a contemporary temperature, and if Mường culture interests you, since it rarely reaches exhibition spaces in the south. The museum is a private one, across the river in An Khánh.

   Look past the visible surface of each work and earth, lacquer, time and memory stop existing as separate things.