Thắm Lại: Group Exhibition

Thắm Lại brings together four artists, Tường Danh, Như Xuân Hứa, Anh-Phuong Nguyen, and Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, to examine desire as progress, tracing how women’s longing has shaped Vietnamese culture across centuries. The exhibition takes its title from a line in “Mời ăn trầu” (Offering Betel), a poem attributed to the poet Hồ Xuân Hương¹, referencing the concept of thắm lại, the act of becoming red again, a staining that accrues through repetition and the labors of wanting. At the heart of the show is the concept of duyên: a bond written in fate, carrying people into one another’s lives and out again.

John Balaban translates “Có phải duyên nhau thời thắm lại” as “If love is fated, you’ll chew it red.”² But something shifts in translation. The word duyên has no English equivalent, it speaks to fate, to a destined connection that persists, the inevitability of certain bonds. Balaban’s line lands on the act: chewing betel until your teeth stain red, passion made physical, the labors of love. The Vietnamese lingers on the bond itself, and on thắm lại, the becoming red again, the staining that happens through repetition.

Many of the poems attributed to Hồ Xuân Hương were passed down orally and later gathered under her name. They speak directly, and without shame, about feminine sexuality, longing, and power. Her betel invitation carries desire, wit, agency. That so many of these poems circulated through oral tradition before being attributed to Xuân Hương says something: she became an icon for collective expression, a way for generations of women to speak what they felt and wanted.

This exhibition follows this lineage. The artists here explore girlhood, womanhood, Vietnamese mythology, the labors of women in society, and the intimacies and conflicts of all of this, working with traditional craft, domestic labor, hospitality work, and emotional work (romantic, social, familial) as sites of production and connection. The gallery holds both the precision of ancestral techniques and the repetitive strain of contemporary labor systems, the actual conditions under which Vietnamese women have worked and continue to work.

From Xuân Hương’s poetic subversions to the practices here, Vietnamese women have articulated, preserved, and transformed culture through making and desiring. The exhibition asks: what is the work that stains us? What labor and what longing leave their marks, binding us to what came before and what comes next, the red deepening with each return?

T Ư Ờ N G  D A N H

The exhibition opens with Lân Sư Hồ, a monumental sculpture by Tường Danh that emerges from a bed of sand as if surfacing from myth itself. The creature is Danh’s own, born from deep familiarity with the sacred beasts of Vietnamese and Chinese cosmology, the Dragon, Qilin, Turtle, and Phoenix, long woven into Vietnamese culture alongside more indigenous figures like Nghê and Hổ Phù. From these lineages Danh draws and reimagines: Lân Sư Hồ carries the dignified head of the Lân, the powerful body of the Sư, and the nimble tail of the Hồ³, embodying wisdom, courage, and holy power. Its construction is elemental: a calamus⁴ and papier-mâché head, a steel and bamboo body, its scales and fur inlaid with seashells and dead coral washed ashore in Quy Nhơn, Bình Định, and Phú Quý island. Colossal yet innocent, ancient yet present.

Vietnamese mythology has always centered women. The Trưng Sisters⁵ rode into battle on war elephants and held back an empire. Âu Cơ⁶ carried a hundred eggs to the mountaintop and became the mother of a people. These figures endure because myth accumulates, shaped and reshaped across generations until it crystallizes into something that feels eternal, inseparable from the culture it emerges from. Myths survive because they hold fundamental human experiences: courage, longing, transformation, the will to protect what is loved. Danh is making myth in the present. Because of the depth of research and devotion embedded in Lân Sư Hồ, the sculpture already feels like something retrieved rather than made, as if it had always existed somewhere, waiting. The creature carries a legend of return, appearing when virtue holds in times of trouble. Across Vietnamese history, the ones who tended to virtue across generations, who kept the culture alive in times of erasure, were women.

Danh herself moves through the world as if from myth. To encounter her is to step into a fairytale—tall, striking, always in an extravagant composition of traditional Vietnamese dress and her own fearless collage of taste, she sings, performs, and inhabits the world the way we imagine the women of mythology did: fully, on their own terms. As a transgender woman, Danh’s presence in this lineage carries particular weight. She is longing as progress made flesh—creating new mythology around what it means to be a Vietnamese woman, expanding who that category holds and who it can become. Perhaps one day her work will be studied the way we now study the Trưng Sisters: as a record of what a culture needed to believe, and who had the courage to embody it first.

V Â N - N H I  N G U Y Ễ N

Vân-Nhi Nguyễn’s untitled photography series draws the viewer into the interior worlds of young women in contemporary Hanoi—their love, their grief, their shared moments of intimacy. Returning to the city after years abroad, Nguyễn found it reshaped by aggressive economic expansion, the demolition of historical sites, and the erasure of its youth’s cultural life. Against this, she turns her lens toward what persists: female friendship, quiet resistance, the tender textures of daily life theatricalized between fiction and reality, masculine and feminine. The work traces generational shifts from her mother’s era to her own, following how young Vietnamese women navigate the fracture between outward Western assimilation and inner cultural tradition.

Shot entirely on film, the photographs carry a softness that makes the present look like memory, some images slightly hazy, slightly out of focus, as if time is already working on them. The staging is deliberate and ceremonial. In Padauk and Pearl, three women occupy a domestic interior with the gravity of a Renaissance painting: one stands, two are on the floor, one cradling the reclined body of another. The women who meet the camera’s gaze do so directly, pulling the viewer into the scene as if they have walked in on something sacred and unfinished. The photographs are shown in a room laid with a maroon rug, reminiscent of those found in homes and hotel lobbies across Vietnam, familiar and liminal at once. Tường Danh appears in both Padauk and Pearl and Danh, An and Linh, a presence that is itself a kind of duyên, the fated bond made visible between the artists in this very exhibition. That two artists in the same show would find each other already inside each other’s work speaks to how tightly woven the lives of Vietnamese women artists are, how they move through the world in community, in each other’s frames. Female friendship is the subject and the structure. These women live and work among each other, reflect each other, and in doing so, hold up a mirror to contemporary life in Vietnam as it actually is. Their longing reaches out of the frame. That the series remains ongoing carries this same quality, continuous and expansive, always reaching toward something just beyond the frame, pushing the work endlessly into the future.

A N H - P H U O N G  N G U Y E N

Anh-Phuong Nguyen presents a new body of sculptural works animated by the tension and drama of surfaces, and by recurring obsessions with kitsch, replicas, and cultural cliché. Her most ambitious work to date, Las Vegas Symphony, returns here in a new iteration: three show-specific mechanised landscapes occupying the room. Two feature fields of glowing towel roses; a third stages a cloud and a palm tree in slow, motorized drift. In the middle of the room stands Hospitality Girl, a resin cast of a smiling woman, hand on hip, serving platter extended, a martini glass balanced and ready. She is the still center of the spectacle, the human figure the landscape has been built around. The work draws on the culture of hotel towel folding, treating the towel as an object of purity, romance, and fantasy, a surface through which ideals of beauty, landscape, and spectacle are mediated and performed. Neoclassical symmetry and aesthetic harmony are deployed here as tools of seduction, staging a world of choreographed desire in a darkened, silent room punctuated only by the steady hum of motors.

Vietnam’s hospitality industry is one of the fastest growing in Southeast Asia, built in no small part on the labor of women whose care, warmth, and service have been absorbed into the country’s image as a destination. The Vietnamese woman as gracious host, attentive, selfless, ornamental, is both a cultural stereotype and an economic engine. This labor is a form of longing too: women performing the fantasies of tourists and the demands of a rapidly expanding service economy, while carrying their own desires for stability, mobility, and a better life. Common Language begins with a discovery that sits inside all of this: a wooden business card holder, shaped as two open hands extending from a heart-shaped base, found among leftover stock in her grandmother’s storage unit, remnants of a now-closed souvenir shop on Tô Tịch Street. Originally produced in the woodworking village of Đông Kỳ and widely circulated in the early 2000s, the object sits between mass production and handicraft, between Oriental earnestness and the socioeconomic optimism of the Đổi Mới era⁷. Nguyen reconstitutes it in cast silicone, the familiar form made uncanny: flesh-toned, smooth, unblemished, toy-like. In Vietnam, hands proliferate as image and symbol, the thousand hands of Quan Âm⁸, each one an extension of compassion reaching toward suffering; the practiced hands of the massage worker, offering relief and care as labor; the folded hands of the hotel towel swan, arranged for a guest who will barely notice. Hands that give, hands that serve, hands that heal. Inverted on the wall, the card holder’s hands hover in ambiguity, giving or receiving or letting go, their erotic charge quiet but insistent. The longing embedded in the gesture is impossible to separate from who has always been asked to extend it.

N H Ư  X U Â N  H Ứ A

A selection from Như Xuân Hứa’s series Let the Horses Ride closes the exhibition, entered through a room whose entire floor is covered in green turf grass, playful, unexpected, an invitation to shed the weight of adulthood and meet the work with openness. The grass disarms before the photographs do their work, and the photographs ask something of you. In Gossip I and Gossip II, two women stand in a bathroom, one fixing her hair, one holding a compact to her face, caught in the unremarkable intimacy of getting ready. In Odalisque I, a girl reclines on a sofa with the ease and weight of an art historical odalisque, the pose at once referencing and reclaiming that tradition. The audience is a spectator to these scenes, pulled into moments that feel simultaneously staged and entirely true.

Drawing from modern Vietnamese art and Taiwanese cinema, Hứa conceives these works as photographic paintings where illusion and reality merge. Chromatic inversion lends the images a dreamlike, negative-film quality, weddings, birthday dinners, Christmas Eve gatherings, dance parties, family memories surfacing from old photographs, layered over portraits of muses and friends taken between Arles and Paris, recomposed inside the Hôtel de la Lauzière, an iconic Arlesian building on the threshold of its own renewal. The original exhibition of Let the Horses Ride took place there itself, the photographs shown inside the very building where they were made. Brought to Vietnam, the work enters a new context. Some of these images reach back into family memory, into a lineage rooted here, and for them to return inverts the typical arc of diaspora, where culture is carried outward and away. The stories travel in the other direction, much like the inversion of the photographs themselves, where what was dark becomes light, the image turned inside out and seen anew.

Hứa describes the project as born from inner urgency, the feeling of walls closing in, the need to leave or escape, and what emerges is a family album still in development, populated by souls who feel as if they have already crossed paths in another life. This is duyên at its most intimate: the sense that the people in your life were always going to be there, that the bond preceded the meeting. A mother watches her children eat toast and wonders how to do better. This is where longing lives: inside the ordinary, inside the repeated gesture of wanting to love well, to be present, to hold onto what passes. Desire here acts like a leash, pulling you forward into life, into the next moment and the next generation, but always tethered to what came before. You move because you want, and you want because of everything that shaped you.

I want, and therefore I am.

Without desire there is no forward motion, no reason to make anything, no spirit animating a life.

Longing not as a symptom of lack, longing as an engine.

To want is to move, to move is to accumulate things.

“If love is fated, you’ll chew it red.”

The stain is still deepening.

1 Hồ Xuân Hương (c. 1772–1822) is considered the “Queen of Nôm poetry.” Much of her biography remains contested; the poems attributed to her circulated orally before being gathered and published posthumously.

2 John Balaban, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

3 Lân refers to the qilin, a mythical creature of good omen in Vietnamese and Chinese cosmology, associated with prosperity and wisdom. Sư is the lion, a symbol of power and protection. Hồ is the fox, known for its cunning and nimbleness. Together they form a composite sacred creature unique to Tường Danh’s practice.

4 Calamus is a genus of rattan palms native to tropical Asia, widely used in traditional Southeast Asian craft and construction for its flexible, durable cane.

5 Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị, known as the Trưng Sisters, led a revolt against Chinese Han dynasty rule in 40 CE. They are among the most celebrated figures in Vietnamese history and mythology.

6 Âu Cơ is a founding mother figure in Vietnamese mythology, said to have given birth to a hundred eggs from which the Vietnamese people descended.

7 Đổi Mới (Renovation) refers to the economic and political reforms introduced by the Vietnamese government in 1986, transitioning the country toward a socialist-oriented market economy and opening Vietnam to foreign investment and trade.

8 Quan Âm (Guānyīn) is the bodhisattva of compassion, widely venerated across Vietnam, China, and much of East and Southeast Asia. One of her most iconic forms depicts her with a thousand hands, each extended in an act of mercy.