Duo exhibition «Như màn đêm kia cũng thấy» (As if the night could see us)

   Darkness pulls your eyes deep into the familiar, only to unearth the strangeness hidden inside it. Two artists meet exactly at that edge, where everything is all but soundly asleep, and build a stage on which the visitor is audience and performer at the same time.

   Gate Gate Gallery presents the duo show by Zunng Zunng and Vũ Diệu Hương, curated by Nhi Phan. As the night falls the roles begin to swap: stepping into the space, you keep passing through different acts in the stories of days gone by, a game of child pretend, a glance back at childhood from another distance.

   Two lines of practice meet in the room:

• — the past that relentlessly finds its way back, fidgeting inside the bodies of objects
• — the present carrying moments of impasse, tacitly acknowledged through drifting strokes of colour

   Vũ Diệu Hương was born in Nam Định and works at the intersection of fragility and violence lurking under the aesthetics of cuteness, childhood and femininity. She holds an MFA in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA in Digital Media from RMIT University Vietnam, using technology and performative fiction to investigate repressed memories through sculptural bodies and performance. She received the Vietnam Festival of Creativity and Design Grant and the RMIT Art and Design Grant, and has shown at A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur and Feelium Gallery in London.

   This suits anyone who likes slow contemporary art, the kind that asks you to stand in front of one piece for a while. It is also a rare chance to see sculptural and digital performance work by a Vietnamese artist recently back from Goldsmiths. The gallery sits in a lane off Pasteur, in the centre of the city. Opening hours are 10:00–12:00 and 13:30–18:00, Tuesday to Sunday; Mondays closed.

   In the night of the mind, once your eyes stop being tricked by the illusion of orderly dailiness, what is concealed quietly steps forward.