Nguyễn Tấn Cương, Untitled, from Outer Field, 2024, mixed media, oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm. Courtesy of galerie frank elbaz and Galerie Bao
Abstraction in Vietnam is not a thing of the past, nor a belated extension of Western modernism. On the contrary, it constitutes one of the most enduring and progressive artistic approaches underpinning the foundations of the country’s contemporary art. As art historian Pamela N. Corey observes, although abstraction has never formed a unified field of discourse and was long absent from official art historiography (largely written from a Northern Vietnamese perspective), it nonetheless remained a space in which artists sought new visual languages to navigate the spiritual, political, and material transformations brought about by the Đổi Mới cultural and economic reforms of 1986.
After Đổi Mới, abstraction emerged as a form of liberation from socialist didacticism, as well as from the inherited anxieties of Western modernist debates. For artists in Southern Vietnam who continued to work after the end of the war in 1975 but had been compelled to abandon abstract expression, returning to abstraction also became a way to reclaim artistic freedom and to resume a creative trajectory that had been abruptly interrupted. Here, abstraction functions both as an aesthetic movement and as an act of resistance.
Presented at galerie frank elbaz in Paris in collaboration with Galerie Bao, the exhibition Re:form is structured around this spirit of freedom. It traces the practices of five Vietnamese artists who, since Đổi Mới, have returned to abstraction while breaking away from its earlier conventions.
The exhibition presents different generations of artists. Nguyễn Tấn Cương (b.1954) and Đỗ Hoàng Tường (b.1963), two members of the pioneering Group of Ten that championed abstract practices in the early 1990s, have since taken divergent artistic paths. From interior worlds of luminous, atmospheric suggestion for the first one, constructing a language of abstraction grounded in inner landscapes and primordial gestures. To returning to visceral corporeal forms described as a "shout”, for the second, representing restless human figures within fictional settings.
Another younger generation, including Thảo Nguyên Phan (b.1987) and Trương Công Tùng (b.1986), approaches abstraction as a way of sensing rather than describing, extending it into conceptual practices, video, installation, and ecology. Thảo Nguyên Phan transforms the historical archives of missionary-anthropologist Jacques Dournes into a shadow-play projection suspended in a dreamlike atmosphere. While Trương Công Tùng constructs living structures from soil, resin, plants, and belief systems, expanding abstraction into worlds of spirits, climates, and cosmologies.
From Hanoi, artist Hà Mạnh Thắng (b. 1981) is seen as significant by the generation that stepped through the door opened in 1992. His gradual shift from figuration to de-figuration unfolds like a meditative journey, where abstraction is a temporal field in which history is not depicted but eroded, layered, and reconfigured.
Re:form proposes that to look at abstraction in Vietnam is to look directly at the contemporary, with all its ruptures, fluidities, and unfinished possibilities. It is constantly reshaping itself in response to the cultural, political, and ecological shifts of the country. In this context, abstraction is not a universal style borrowed from the West but an aesthetic response to the complexities of post-socialist life, the afterlives of war, and the intensifying pressures of modernization and global exchange.