Group exhibition «tích, tách, mảnh mơ» («fiction, fraction»)

   Six artists, six visual languages, all tracing the small stories left behind under the polished surface of the city. The show runs for almost two months in central Ho Chi Minh City — long enough to come back a second time and hear the works say something different.

   Rare Sea presents «tích, tách, mảnh mơ» (fiction, fraction), where oil painting, lacquer, silk, paper and hand-printed work share one room. Flatness here is not a limit but an invitation into layers of gesture, material and accumulated time.

   Who is showing:

• — Lê Đ. Chung (b. 1990, based in Đắk Nông) builds up oil paint to tell the story of a post-Đổi Mới migrant community living on the remains of an abandoned factory in Lâm Đồng.
• — Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai holds an MFA from Mahasarakham University in Thailand (2012), lectures at the University of Arts, Hue University, and received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2014 and The Factory's Artist Excellence Award in 2021; she works on notebook and carbon paper about Vietnamese-Cambodian survivors of forced displacement from Kampong Chhnang.
• — Lê Nguyễn Minh Như (b. 1996) is one of very few young artists painting on silk with mineral pigments; the 2023 Dogma Prize turned critical attention to her language.
• — Huyền Dương (b. 2001) holds a BFA in oil painting from Tama Art University in Tokyo and is completing an MA in Digital Media in Bremen.
• — Thanh Tùng (Ches, b. 1998, from Hải Phòng) is a multimedia artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, working from urban legends and oral histories.
• — Sophia Mai Brown (b. 2000) is a New York-based artist in drawing and printmaking, a recipient of the Fulbright Grant and a Manhattan Graphics Center Fellowship, with a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.

   This is a show for people who would rather stand in front of one work for ten minutes than walk past thirty. If you want a compact, honest reading of what Vietnamese artists born in the 1990s and 2000s are thinking about right now, you will find it here.

   The opening runs for two hours from 6 PM on 7 August and is the one evening when most of the artists are in the room. From 8 August the exhibition keeps regular hours, Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Mondays.

   Rare Sea sits on Đặng Thị Nhu street in the old central district, a few minutes on foot from Bến Thành market. The organisers suggest the TNXP car park at 4 Trương Định, about 900 m away — roughly a two-minute walk.

   Come and see which of the whispers you end up hearing.