Group exhibition «Dư Mộng» (Echoes of a dream)

   In art, a dream is not necessarily an escape from reality into a fictional world. It can be a way reality gets perceived, transformed, and handed back to you in another form. Three painters at Annam Gallery work along that line.

   Lê Mai, Lâm Tú Trân and Lâm Gia Huấn each start from a different field of observation, yet converge on a shared interest: how the world is seen, retained and transformed through inner life. Nature, memory, the human figure and the shifting states of the inner world intertwine across their practices, evoking a distinctly East Asian sensibility in which the visible always carries resonances extending beyond itself.

   Three routes in:

• — Lê Mai works through direct observation and plein-air study, registering landscape through the changing conditions of light, time and perception
• — Lâm Tú Trân turns image into narrative, converting experience and memory into a language of suggestion and openness
• — Lâm Gia Huấn makes the female figure the site where beauty, personal memory and cultural echoes rooted in the Mekong region converge

   This suits anyone who prefers contemplative painting to declarative painting, and anyone curious about what the younger southern generation is doing with a traditional medium. The gallery sits close to the centre, off Hai Bà Trưng.

   Perhaps, like a dream, art does not need to be explained all the way to the end. It only needs to open a moment of recognition, the sense that what you are looking at may have existed somewhere before.