"The Invisible Life" — solo exhibition by Nguyễn Quốc Dũng

   Abandoned neighbourhoods, underpaid workers, crowding that leaves no private space — everything a city produces and then leaves behind, painted in oil and hung on the walls of a gallery in Tân Sơn Hòa. This is a body of work that looks straight at what the eye is trained to skip.

   Nguyễn Quốc Dũng paints the city he actually lives in. His pictures hold on to very concrete social material — economic change, overcrowding, the absence of privacy, rising inflation, the indifference of a material life built on consuming technology and what follows from it. His method is direct observation, edited together with invented elements to build the picture; that lets him examine a shifting social context while pursuing his own subjective enquiries into history, geopolitics and art.

   Worth knowing
— A solo show, not a group one: a single voice, a single line of thought
— The works have been painted steadily from 2021 to now — nearly four years watching one city
— Oil on canvas, wide-ranging subjects; each painting is a separate story hidden behind the life of an urban person

   It is for anyone interested in contemporary Vietnamese painting and in urbanisation seen through faces rather than statistics. If you live in Ho Chi Minh City, chances are you have walked past these scenes without stopping. The gallery sits in Tân Sơn Hòa, a short ride from the centre.

   The invisible stays invisible only until someone paints it. Which corner will you recognise?