An exhibition by Nguyen The Son and Tran Huy Anh, as a part of the Hanoi Photo Biennale 2025
Art Vietnam Gallery is pleased to announce the most recent achievement of our artist/photographer Nguyen The Son, the exhibition Crossroads – Nguyen The Son and Tran Huy Anh, opening November 4 -30, 2025 at 46 Hang Bai Street, Hanoi, Vietnam, as part of the Hanoi Photo Biennale 2025.
Once again Son explores the intersections of life, architecture and development that have long been the focus of this interdisciplinary artist. Art Vietnam’s first exhibition of Son’s work, New Higher Level 2009, was an exhibition of silk paintings that depicted the interplay of the encroaching rapid development and technology intermixed with the lives of everyday activities of the people. In 2012, after receiving his master’s with honors in Photography from CAFA, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Son shifted his medium and expanded this investigation of the interplay between people, technology, and development.
This current exhibition’s focus is to use photography as a story teller, combining the research of the urban archaeology of Tran Huy Anh, and technology to invite the viewers to become a part of the story, to be a part of a living breathing organism encompassing past present and memory.
Son uses the idea of a crossroad, the corner of the street, as a symbol of the turning point of how in the war time with the French, the people were forced to abandon, or share their houses with many others, transitioning to a very different way of living. These transitions carry the stories of the families and how they coped with the changing times. Huy Anh continues to develop the story with his research and uses his knowledge of science and techonology to elucidate this transition. Each artwork has a drawing carved on a plexi box that portrays the part that was removed, thereby revealing the original sturcture on the top.
This revealing of the history overlay on the top of the work completes the story and invites the viewer to interact and add their own layer of memory or experiece to the story.
In the review of the arts writer Pham Minh Quan’s critique of this exhibition, Crossroads: A Cartographic Dialogue, he so precisely proclaims, “The uniqueness of Crossroads lies in its rare interdisciplinary synthesis between photography, architecture, graphics, urban planning, and data technology. Methods that seem unrelated are placed side by side within a single exhibition space, together narrating the story of the city in multiple visual languages. If Thế Sơn reveals memory through light and material surfaces, then Trần Huy Ánh sketches its coordinates through maps and data systems. Their dialogue unfolds like overlapping geological strata of the urban fabric, composing a map of time – a true cartographic dialogue.”
We invite you to join us in celebrating this exhibition that portrays the depth of this investigation of memory using this unique intergration of interdiscipllinary science and the arts. The way of our present and future. A crossroads of body, mind and spirit as well as the nature of interbeing.
Suzanne Lecht
Art Director
Art Vietnam Gallery
Hanoi Vietnam
