The Sky is the Same Everywhere
11 am – 07 pm, Tues – Sun, 08 Nov – 07 Dec 2025
Manzi Exhibition Space
2 alley Hàng Bún, Ba Đình, Hà Nội
From the organizer:
Manzi is pleased to present The Sky is the Same Everywhere—the latest body of work by Đinh Thị Thắm Poong, one of the most outstanding female painters in contemporary Vietnamese art.
The paintings featured in this open studio—all oil on canvas, started in early 2025 and only recently completed—mark a new departure for Thắm Poong. Instead of continuing to expand her surreal universe on the flat surface of dzo paper through layers of intricate patterns, dramatic palettes, and interwoven human–nature imagery that have long defined her practice, Thắm Poong now chooses to work within a pre-existing surface: she paints over the landscape oils by her younger brother, painter Đinh Thảo Phong.
This series of landscapes, dating back to a decade ago, has long existed as self-contained worlds—each with its own perspective, light, horizon, and chromatic harmony. Thắm Poong’s intervention, though restrained, is strikingly transformative: a single, radiant shade of gold unfolds across the surface, blossoming into delicate ornamentation. Tiny leaves align to cast the shadows of trees or the silhouette of a horse; geometric motifs cascade like water, drift like clouds, or branch out into canopies. Her signature painterly language now finds itself displaced—even “misplaced”—within another’s pictorial order, generating a subtle negotiation between two independent visions / autonomous ways of seeing. Without erasure or dominance, this superimposition becomes a kind of pact, where the real and the imagined, the before and the after, coexist in a fleeting yet lyrical resonance.
The sky is the same everywhere—a seemingly neutral, immutable expanse suspended beyond reach. Yet the world never discloses itself without the gaze that summons it into presence. Vision does not merely apprehend reality; it gives it form. Thus, even though the sky may appear as a single, unchanging entity, each act of seeing constitutes it anew.
About artist Đinh Thị Thắm Poong
Born in 1970 in a Muong minority family, Dinh Thi Tham Poong went on to study at the Hanoi Fine Arts College and graduated in 1993.
Poong combines images from her own Muong heritage with a surrealist visual landscape imbuing her canvases – both formally and emotionally – with quality which can be described as utterly unique and completely global. Pure flights of the imagination fuse with concrete details from daily life creating canvases that work and play in the ethereal landscape of the mind. Utilizing a pattern uponpatterninaflat palette of color on traditional Dzo paper, the artist creates a world at once introspective and surrealistic. Depictions of ethnic minorities juxtaposed with flat decorative pattern are flights of imagination fused with normal daily life, they are but one destination point in this versatile artist’s work.
Tham Poong’s works are held in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.
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