RE:FORM Exhibition Explores Vietnamese Abstraction Post-Đổi Mới

galerie frank elbaz will present RE:FORM, a group exhibition on view at the gallery from March 14 to May 23, 2026.

Organized in collaboration with Galerie Bao and curated by its founder, Lê Thiên-Bảo, the exhibition brings together five major figures from different generations: Nguyễn Tấn Cương, Đỗ Hoàng Tường, Hà Mạnh Thắng, Thảo Nguyên Phan, and Trương Công Tùng, to explore how abstraction has been revisited in Vietnam since the cultural and economic reforms of Đổi Mới in 1986.

Emerging in the 1990s as a form of liberation from socialist artistic doctrine, abstraction first resurfaced in Southern Vietnam with pioneers Nguyễn Tấn Cương and Đỗ Hoàng Tường. Its influence later reached Hanoi through artists such as Hà Mạnh Thắng, while a younger generation in Ho Chi Minh City, including Thảo Nguyên Phan and Trương Công Tùng, expands its possibilities through video, installation, and ecological narratives.

Re:form suggests that looking at abstraction in Vietnam is also a way of looking at the contemporary, with its ruptures, fluidities, and unfinished possibilities. Rather than a delayed echo of Western modernism, abstraction appears here as an aesthetic response to post-socialist life, the afterlives of war, and the pressures of modernization and global exchange.

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