Exhibition “The Playground”

05 – 30 Dec 2025
KA Koncept
03 Hai Bà Trưng, Hà Nội

From the organizer:

The Playground, the debut solo exhibition of Pham Cong Thanh, is a manifesto of the “play” spirit in art — a place where he makes rules, breaks rules, and tests his own rules. Painting appears as an open “server,” where he constructs private worlds filled with cards, clocks, chessboards, arenas, musicians… familiar symbols that are constantly bent out of usual logic to reveal inner conflicts, obsessions, and his distinctive humor.

The exhibition guides viewers through the flexibility of tone and emotion: sometimes radiant, sometimes subdued; joy and sadness, freedom and constraint coexist in a visual rhythm. Each layer of paint is an open proposition, not something that must be “decoded,” but an invitation for viewers to enter with their own emotions and memories.

For Thanh, painting is a “serious game”: freedom paired with discipline, creativity paired with challenge. He likens himself to the “admin” of a peculiar server — building worlds, installing rules, and waiting to see who is curious enough to join in. Beneath that lightness are long days of labor, misdirected canvases corrected through repeated loops of searching for balance.

Many of the images in his works arise from reality: clocks as metaphors for the obsession with time, playing cards hinting at chance, chessboards reflecting inner struggle, intertwined with vague remnants of memories lingering after long nights. The humor in the paintings doesn’t avoid heaviness; it approaches it as lightly as possible — where painting and content meet: observing closely, thinking slowly, telling stories intimately.

The Playground marks the moment Thanh steps away from the “content zone” to return to his original role: an observer and a serious player in the world he creates. It is the beginning of a new phase of practice, where imagination, memory, and life are reconstructed with a tone that is witty yet refined.

In this playground, Thanh does not wait for viewers to “understand correctly.” He only hopes they play — looking long or briefly, contemplating or setting their own rules. For him, art only truly lives when the viewer becomes part of the game.

Exhibition curator,
Tiffany Nguyen

About the artist:

Born in 1993 in Hanoi, Pham Cong Thanh (Huyme) started drawing at a very young age, first as a game, and later as the only way he felt he could understand and endure the world around him. There was a period when he stopped drawing, but in truth he had only shifted to another form of creation; whenever he isn’t making something, restlessness immediately follows. For Thanh, creativity is a way to stay balanced, an instinctive rhythm he knows he’ll never walk away from.

At the age of 15, Thanh Pham left Vietnam to study Fine Arts and Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art (Ohio, USA). Years of observing, moving, and experimenting across materials allowed his practice to take shape organically, disciplined yet playful.

With The Playground, Thanh Pham steps outside the familiar “content zone”and returns to his most original role: an observer, a serious player within his own invented world. This is not only his first solo exhibition, but also the starting point of a new phase in his artistic practice where imagination, memory, and everyday life are reconstructed with a tone that is humorous yet incisive. It reveals his enduring commitment to creativity as the way he keeps himself alive, alert, and honest.

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