Art exhibit showcases an open dialogue between Việt Nam and Japan

An exhibition in HCM City presents the perspectives of emerging Vietnamese artists balanced in harmony with the lingering splendour of Japanese antiques dating back centuries.

An exhibition in HCM City presents the perspectives of emerging Vietnamese artists balanced in harmony with the lingering splendour of Japanese antiques dating back centuries.

Forms of Presence explores the connection between materiality and emotion through a conversation between antiques and contemporary art.

The exhibition brings contemporary Vietnamese painting into a quiet dialogue with Imari ceramics and ritual bronzes from Japan. It unfolds across three intertwined realms: the layered presence of nature, the meditative and the everyday.

In each of these realms, five contemporary Vietnamese artists - Đoàn Xuân Tặng, Nguyễn Thế Hùng, Khổng Đỗ Duy, Đoàn Văn Tới and Mifa - enter into a conversation with Japanese antiques, bringing a modern perspective.

Though separated by centuries, all the works in this exhibition treat surface - whether ceramic, bronze, silk, canvas or traditional Vietnamese điệp paper - not as mere material, not simply decorative or abstract, but as vessels of emotion, thought and layered narratives.

Each artist works with a distinct material and sensibility: the co-existence of the mythic and the mountainous in Tặng’s meditations on tradition and modernisation; the multilayered cultural motifs embedded in Hùng’s hybrid forms; Duy's quietly symbolic domestic interiors; the interbeing of all things in Tới’s contemplative gestures; and the emotional resonance of nature, poetic traces of cultural memory and inner turbulence in Mifa’s expressive abstractions.

Across these varied approaches runs a shared concern with presence, not only of image or object, but of spirit.

Paired with Japanese antiques from gilded ceramics to sacred bronzes, all of which have long carried their own silent narratives, whispering of daily life, spiritual reflection and the generative power of nature, the exhibition invites an open dialogue not only between two cultures, but across emotions, traditions and the unknowns of time.

The exhibition runs until July 15 at The Vista, 628C Võ Nguyên Giáp, Dictrict 2 in HCM City.