Ceci N’est Pas Une Guerre - This Is Not A War - Exhibition Curated by Do Tuong Linh Eli @ Klein Gallery, New York

Ceci N’est Pas Une Guerre - This Is Not A War

Curated by Do Tuong Linh

Eli Klein Gallery, New York

Through August 23, 2025

Bui Cong Khanh

Porcelain Medals, 2018

140 hand painted porcelain medals

Courtesy of Eli Klein Gallery

© Bui Cong Khanh

Ca Le Thang

Beneath Deep Rivers, Field Submerged No. 3, 2024

Oil, acrylic, and mixed media on canvas

39 3/8 x 67 inches  (100 x 170 cm)

Courtesy of the artist, Salon Wiking, and Eli Klein Gallery 

© Ca Le Thang

Nguyen Phuong Linh

Allergy, 2004

6kg of nails on underwears

Courtesy of Eli Klein Gallery

© Nguyen Phuong Linh

Eli Klein Gallery presents “Ceci N’est Pas Une Guerre - This Is Not A War,” a group exhibition of 17 Vietnamese artists showcasing 24 works. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the exhibition seeks to challenge the long-standing tendency to confine Vietnamese contemporary art within narrow narratives of war, trauma, and survival. Audiences are invited to move beyond inherited narratives and experience the breadth, complexity, and vitality of Vietnamese contemporary art today: unbound, unpredictable, and charged with energy.

Artists: Bui Cong Khanh, Bui Thanh Tam, Ca Le Thang, Doan Van Toi, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy, Le Hoang Bich Phuong, Oanh Phi Phi, Nguyen Phuong Linh, Anh Thuy Nguyen, Xuân-Lam Nguyen, Ha Ninh Pham, Pham Tuan Tu, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Tran Luong, Truong Tan, Van Khanh, Minh Dung Vu

The exhibition prompts a reconsideration of how Vietnamese visual culture is presented within a global context. While artists have engaged deeply with the past fifty years of history after the War, their works have often been interpreted through the lens of the aftermath. Within the context of Vietnam's massive economic reforms, the artists critically explore themes of identity, censorship, and queerness. The exhibition focuses on a younger generation of artists who reflect on materiality, memory, and mythology, reimagining self and culture beyond the burden of historical trauma. The exhibition also highlights Vietnamese artists living abroad, particularly in America, France and Germany, whose works address themes of displacement, cultural hybridity, and artistic innovation. Curated by Do Tuong Linh, the show brings together the voices that challenge the notion of “Vietnamese art” as a singular concept, creating a layered dialogue that is poetic and political, introspective and globally engaged.

Emerging in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the implementation of the widespread generation of influential artists responded to history, memory, and the shifting boundaries of identity and expression in deeply personal and resonant ways. Ca Le Thang’s compositionally poetic painting serves as a quiet footnote to the natural and spiritual landscapes of southern Vietnam, expressing a deep emotional connection to his homeland’s nature and history. Through humor and symbolism, Tran Luong retells a traditional Vietnamese legend in a gently narrated yet subtly subversive manner, reflecting the sociopolitical tensions and transformations of early 21st-century Vietnam.

Truong Tan, who was considered the first openly gay artist from Vietnam, creates work that is both emblematic and groundbreaking in its exploration of social norms and marginalized identities. Blending historical research with conceptual art not taught in Vietnam’s educational system, Bui Cong Khanh playfully, yet critically, challenges official reward systems by combining porcelain military insignias from multiple nations to question the authority behind medals. Vietnamese lacquer serves as the core medium in Oanh Phi Phi’s practice, through which she explores the transmission of memory, reflections on image theory, and experimental possibilities in scale and technique. Bui Thanh Tam blends the delicate spirit of Vietnamese folk traditions with the bold allure of pop and consumer culture, creating works that are at once challenging, seductive, and provocative.

Building on this historical trajectory, a younger cohort turned toward material experimentation, ironic language, and cross-disciplinary methods to address contemporary social issues, incisively engaging with gender, politics, and cultural memory amid Vietnam’s rapid transformation. Pham Tuan Tu combines elements of primitivism and humor in his work, using refined craftsmanship and a diverse range of materials to delve into the complexities of contemporary society. Nguyen Phuong Linh weaves personal memories into broader cultural contexts, skillfully transforming found objects and materials to reveal the vulnerability of being a woman in Vietnamese society.

Merging political themes with sci-fi aesthetics, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran constructs nonlinear and absurd narratives of modern history, challenging dominant post–Cold War frameworks surrounding the Global South. Doan Van Toi and Le Hoang Bich Phuong both explore the contemporary rhythms of traditional media. Toi weaves digital pixels into silk and textiles to reflect on the intricate relationship between humans and nature, while Phuong employs delicate silk to blend surrealism with quiet subversion, questioning gender, eccentricity, and societal norms.

Artistic practice continues to expand into the intersections of new media, speculative narratives, and digital processes, reimagining and reconstructing tradition and identity. Vietnamese art now charts a future-oriented sensibility, forging new dialogues and connections between personal experience and global context. My-Lan Hoang-Thuy redefines the relationship between artist and medium, using acrylic drips as a “canvas” to merge painting with personal photography, creating a visual language where intimacy, spontaneity, and imagination intersect. Ha Ninh Pham explores the construction of territories and perception through drawing and sculpture, creating imagined worlds shaped by his unique logic and underlying sense of skepticism. By sewing dyed silk onto canvas, Minh Dung Vu initiates a dialogue between material surface and visual texture, investigating materiality, light, shadow, and perception.

Xuân-Lam Nguyen brings forgotten Vietnamese folk art into contemporary relevance, focusing on Indochinese Orientalist photography and displaced cultural artifacts, blending autobiographical elements with queer identity to construct glitchy, alternative narratives that offer a dynamic commentary on the intersections of identity and history. Anh Thuy Nguyen’s sculptural works explore the relationship between emotional states and the human body. Through digitizing and transforming everyday Vietnamese domestic objects, Van Khanh creates faux-fiber replicas that exist between physical reality and digital dreamscape, reimagining traditions and mythologies within trans narratives.

About the Curator Do Tuong Linh 

Do Tuong Linh is a curator based in Hanoi (Vietnam) and New York City (United States). Linh holds a BA in Art History and theoretical criticism from Vietnam University of Fine Arts, and a MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa, at SOAS (University of London) UK with the prestigious Alphawood scholarship. She is a part of Bard Curatorial Studies program class of 2025 and was part of the curatorial team of 12th Berlin Biennial.

Linh has engaged in various art exhibitions and projects in Southeast Asia, Europe and beyond since 2005. She participated in international arts programs such as Le 18 Curator In Residency 2024, Asia Cultural Council Research Fellowship 2023, Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial 2019, Slovenia; Association of Art Museum Curators conference, New York, USA; Mekong Cultural Hub 2018 – 2019, Taiwan; CIMAM International Museum Workshop 2018, Oslo, Norway; Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, Korea) 2018; Tate Intensive 2018, Tate Modern Museum, UK; French Encounter at Art Basel in Hong Kong 2018. Some of her notable curated exhibitions include Who is Weaving the Sky Net (Singapore), Means of Production 2024 (New York City, USA), Revived Photo Hanoi 2023 (Hanoi, Vietnam), Berlin Biennial 2022 (Berlin, Germany), Citizen Earth 2020 (Hanoi, Vietnam), The Foliage 3 (VCCA, Vincom Center for Contemporary Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam) 2019, Geo-Resilience of the All-world at La Colonie (Paris, France) 2018, the No War, No Vietnam exhibition at Galerie Nord (Berlin, Germany) 2018, and SEAcurrents (London, UK) 2017.

ELI KLEIN GALLERY

398 West Street, New York, NY 10014

www.galleryek.com

Ceci N’est Pas Une Guerre - This Is Not A War

Eli Klein Gallery, New York, May 23 - August 23, 2025

Artist Huong Dodinh @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Transcendence" Exhibition

Huong Dodinh: TRANSCENDENCE 

Pace Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 15, 2024 

HUONG DODINH 

Sans titre, 1990 

© Huong Dodinh, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new and historic works by HUONG DODINH at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Titled TRANSCENDENCE, the show, which marks the artist’s first- ever solo presentation in the US, brings together paintings and works on paper she has created over the course of her career, from the 1960s to the present day. TRANSCENDENCE is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which will be released during the exhibition.

Huong Dodinh was born in Soc Trang, Vietnam in 1945. Forced to flee the country, her family sought refuge in Paris in 1953 after the outbreak of the First Indochina War. Huong Dodinh has lived and worked in the French capital ever since, cultivating a solitary life in service of her artistic pursuits. Insulating herself from art market trends, she has maintained a commitment to authenticity, purity, contemplation, and truth in her work since she began painting in the 1960s.

Over the last six decades, Huong Dodinh has devoted her practice to three central tenets—light, density, and transparency—through which she explores the fluidity of line, form, and negative space. By adopting a private and intensely regimented lifestyle, the artist has developed a distinctive way of making that blurs the boundaries between art and the everyday. Working alone and without any assistants in her Paris atelier, Huong Dodinh takes personal ownership over every step in her process, from sourcing mineral powders for her pigments in Provence to mounting her canvases and applying her paint. Creating her own pigments and organic binders by hand, Huong Dodinh applies thin layers of paint multiple times to forge transparent yet dense surfaces. Through her use of natural materials, she produces vibrant visual effects through absorptions and reflections of light in her elegant, minimalist compositions.

For the opening of her exhibition at Pace—which marks her second solo presentation with the gallery, following her show in Seoul last year—the artist travels to New York for the first time in her life. Holistically, the nearly 30 paintings and works on paper that figure in Huong Dodinh’s debut New York exhibition speak to her longstanding interest in conveying ideas about silence, light, and pure feeling through a language of abstraction.

TRANSCENDENCE begins with a rare figurative scene that the artist made in 1966. Rendered in pastel, La Neige depicts, as its title suggests, a landscape of snow-covered houses and streets. Huong Dodinh encountered snow for the first time when she emigrated from Vietnam to France, and, with this early composition, she explored her relationship to her new natural environment. In works from the following decades, when she leaned increasingly toward total abstraction, the artist continued to meditate on the ways that organic lines and shapes can reflect and represent the wonders of the natural world. Through her work, Duhong Dodinh strives to harmonize relationships and engage in a meaningful exchange with the world around her. As she has said, "Art is a process of opening oneself to others." Recent exhibitions by the artist include her 2021 retrospective at the Guimet Museum in Paris and her solo presentation at the Museo Correr in Venice during the 2022 Venice Biennale.

HUONG DODINH (b. 1945, Vietnam) was born in 1945 in Soc Trang, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Duong Dodinh and her family were forced to flee their war torn home in 1953 and sought refuge in Paris, where the artist continues to live and work today. At a boarding school in Rambouillet, Dodinh witnessed snow for the first time, marveling at the blending of land and sky. She calls this luminescent scene her artistic “epiphany” and it continues to inspire her painting. Duong Dodinh studied at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965 to 1969, completing courses in a wide array of disciplines including engraving, lithography, frescoes, painting, and architecture. During this time, Huong Dodinh was deeply affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of May 1968. After a three-year break, Huong Dodinh was able to return to her artistic practice with a newfound sense of freedom. In the decades that followed, Huong Dodinh dedicated herself to painting, occasionally exhibiting in Paris and often encountering fellow artists based in France such as Peter Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Lisa de Kooning.

 

Duong Dodinh is the recipient of several important awards and distinctions including, 1st Prize at the International Grand Prize for Painting in Cannes (1981), the Silver Cross of Merit and French Dedication (1996), and the Vice President Maison de la Culture d'Asie Orientale (1997). She presented a solo exhibition in 2021 at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, and has participated in group presentations at FRAC de Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, as well as the major contemporary art exhibition Triptyque in Angers.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona - "Tuan Andrew Nguyen Our Ghosts Live in the Future" - Exhibition by the winner of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Tuan Andrew Nguyen 

Our Ghosts Live in the Future

Exhibition by the winner of the 

2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 May - 24 September 2024

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019

Still - 4-channel video installation: colour, 7.1 surround sound; 

28 minutes; dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

A Sullen Moon Behind Lit Mountain Tops, 2023

Image credits: Dan Bradica

Courtesy the artist 

The Fundació Joan Miró presents the first solo exhibition in Spain by Vietnamese-American artist TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN (Saigon, 1976), winner of the eighth edition of the Joan Miró Prize. The show includes some of his most poignant recent video installations, as well as a selection of his sculptures made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the Vietnam War.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen and his family emigrated to the United States as refugees after the end of the war and he uses his artistic practice to interweave his own personal story through the history of his country of birth. This exhibition explores the ways in which conflicts from the second half of the 20th century have impacted not only the people who lived through them but also their descendants.

The show gets under way with three sculptures inspired by the mobiles of American artist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró who was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In stark contrast to Calder’s pieces, however, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s mobiles are made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the lengthy and devastating Vietnam War. In this context, Nguyen’s sculptures are more explosions than formal exercises in art. Moreover, they are also sound pieces, tuned to emit certain frequencies with healing properties. Imbued with deep symbolic meaning, they resonate with the Buddhist idea of the transformative power of compassion.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022

Still, Single-channel video, 4k anamorphic, 

5.1 surround sound, 60min.

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Because No One Living Will Listen / 

Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe, 2023

Still Two-channel 4K video, stereo

Courtesy the artist 

The next three works are video installations linked to the material and personal consequences of the Vietnam War. The first gives a voice to an old unexploded bomb that is about to be detonated fifty years after being dropped. Indeed, throughout Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s audiovisual projects, ostensibly inanimate objects often find a way to tell their own stories as key players in the unfolding endeavour of processing collective trauma. The second installation is a feature film about a mother and daughter struggling to make a living from the scrapyard business they inherited from the father. The daughter salvages metal from the remnants of bombs—the Vietnamese landscape is still studded with unexploded ordnance—to craft uncanny hanging sculptures. One day she accidentally stumbles into the realisation that she must surely be the reincarnation of Alexander Calder. A young Buddhist monk, inspired by the figure of Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches her about the healing properties of sound, which she then applies in her work to help her mother overcome her posttraumatic stress disorder.

The exhibition concludes with one of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s projects linked to the stories of families of non-French soldiers sent by the French colonial administration to fight in Vietnam in what became known as the First Indochina War (1946–1954). In Because No One Living Will Listen, a Vietnamese woman writes a heartfelt letter to her father, a Moroccan soldier in the French army who died when she was a baby. She tells him about the path her life has taken and confesses how disoriented she feels at not fully belonging anywhere—a feeling shared by many other descendants of mixed couples who have to find ways of juggling hybrid cultural identities and integrating their ancestors’ legacy into their own lives.

Our Ghosts Live in the Future gives Spanish audiences the first opportunity to experience Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work in person and gain an appreciation of his artistic vision and committed interest in exploring social and historical issues thrown up by the destabilising effects of colonial legacies. In addition, repeated references in his pieces offer up rereadings of the work of American artist and antiwar activist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert whose presence is keenly felt in the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice resonates with the museum’s collection and with Joan Miró’s legacy as an artist with similarly strong ties to his native country.

The show not only offers a survey of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work but also provides a unique insight into his artistic vision and staunch commitment to social and historical concerns that run through the core of his artistic narrative. It includes a previously unseen piece fashioned out of reused war ordnance made at the artist’s studio in Ho Chi Minh City. Like the sculptures presented at the beginning of the show, this piece is inspired by one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in this case The Corcovado, a large-scale sculpture that forms part of the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. At both the start and end of the exhibition, Tuan Andrew Nguyen engages with key figures in Western modern art who helped shape the dominant artistic narrative of the 20th century.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN is an artist from Saigon, Vietnam who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. His works explore the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fuelled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. He works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He has been the recipient of several awards in both film and visual arts, including grants from Art Matters and VIA Art Fund. Radiant Remembrance, the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, was on view at the New Museum in New York from June 29 - September 17, 2023. His work has been featured in several international exhibitions, including the Aichi Triennial, Whitney Biennial in New York, Biennale de Dakar, Sharjah Biennial and the Berlin Biennale. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró

FUNDACIÓ JOAN MIRÓ | BARCELONA

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona 

www.fmirobcn.org