Another Form of Abstraction: Vietnamese Art Flexes Its Freedom. By Joe Fyfe
Galerie frank elbaz, Paris, 2026, Exhibition View, photos by Claire Dorn, Courtesy of Galerie frank elbaz.
“RE:FORM - A glimpse of abstraction in Vietnam since Đổi Mới” at galerie frank elbaz in Paris
Through May 23, 2026—“Abstraction in the West is different from that in Asia,” curator Lê Thiên-Bảo told me when I remarked that much of the art in “RE:FORM – A glimpse of abstraction in Vietnam since Đổi Mới”, would be counted, according to most definitions, at least in the West, as figurative. “It is much closer to extraction. . . . Painting without form did not exist before Đổi Mới”—the period after 1986 when the country opened to the West through a Socialist-oriented market economy. “Before then, Vietnam was under Russian influence; you were only allowed to make propaganda pictures.” The exhibition traces the practices of five Vietnamese painters and sculptors who since that time have turned to abstraction, which here seems to mean an exploratory, stylistic freedom that could include representation. In the work of several of the artists here, formal experimentation coexists with reflection, through the choice of materials, on the history of their postcolonial, postwar, post-Soviet, neo-consumerist society.
