Exhibition «NOW | Hiện tại»

   Ten years after his first solo exhibition in Vietnam, a painter who came out of graffiti returns with a body of work in which the language of the street has turned inward. It marks a genuine turn in a three-decade practice, and it hangs in a private art museum on Saigon's eastern riverbank.

   The artist is Suby One, born in Paris in 1979 and Franco-Vietnamese. His grounding is graffiti and street culture: speed, gesture, the freedom of the mark. After returning to Vietnam in 2013 he became an active force in the country's urban art scene, starting projects that gathered communities around graffiti culture, and gradually carried that same language onto canvas.

   What gives the exhibition its title sits inside the paintings. Amid dense layers of colour, marks and movement, a white rectangle keeps recurring; the artist calls it NOW, a moment of awareness and absolute presence. The series therefore places you between two poles: the restless noise of a mind in constant motion, and the rare stillness of being fully here.

   Markers along the way:

• — the solo exhibition «Time» at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum a decade ago
• — three decades of practice, from street walls to canvas
• — community projects around graffiti after his return to Vietnam

   It suits followers of urban art, people who paint, and viewers who have never cared about graffiti but want to see street material handled inside a museum. If you assume graffiti is only ever a wall, this series is worth testing that assumption against.

   The run lasts over a month, long enough to pick a quiet weekday and look at it slowly.