Exhibition “Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World – Forging Contemporary Art in 1990s Hanoi
10 am – 05 pm, 10 Dec 2025 – 05 Apr 2026
Vũ Dân Tân Museum
443 Ngọc Thụy, Hà Nội, Việt Nam
From the organizer:
Vu Dan Tan Museum is committed to preserving, researching, documenting, and exhibiting the works of contemporary Vietnamese art pioneer Vu Dan Tan (03.10.1946, Hanoi – 14.10.2009, Hanoi) for the community’s benefit.
The Museum houses installations, sculptures, art objects, paintings, drawings, prints, and artist books by Vu Dan Tan, as well as musical scores, and literary writings, providing local and foreign audiences access to works not previously exhibited. The Museum will conceptualise exhibitions, workshops, and open studios, as well as initiate educational programmes that cater to diverse community audiences through guided tours, art discussions, lectures, seminars, and dialogues, with the aim of sharing expertise and promoting research.
The Museum was designed by the architect Hoang Le (LESTUDIOARCHITECTS) on the site of Vu Dan Tan’s working studio in the Long Bien district of Hanoi.
The inaugural exhibition will present a curated selection of Vu Dan Tan’s major artworks, archival materials, and rare documentation from the artist’s creative universe as described below. It’s a landmark exhibition celebrating the pioneering Vietnamese artist whose experimental vision helped shape the emergence of contemporary art in 1990s Vietnam, a decade of profound social and cultural transformation as the country globalised in the wake of 1986 economic reform (doi moi).
Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009) was a well-known figure in Hanoi, the city of his birth where he worked much of his life. From the 1970s, departing local painting orthodoxies, he produced novel images and forms that would foreground his 1990s conceptually-underpinned multimedia and pluridisciplinary expressive breakthroughs. These included installation series Suitcases of a Pilgrim, first shown internationally at the 1996 Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT2), Queensland Art Gallery, Australia; and his performative installation with a 1961 Cadillac, Cadillac/Icarus, from RienCarNation, unveiled in 1999 at Pacific Bridge, Oakland, California, then transported to Hanoi in 2000. In addition to these two seminal bodies of works, Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World presents other key career series of the 1990s-2000s, Vu Dan Tan’s Money, Fashion, Amazon, and Festival Banners. Curated by Vu Dan Tan specialist and art historian of Southeast Asian contemporary art Iola Lenzi, Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World also includes rare, early-career works on paper from the 1970s, archival documents, films, and performance relics framing the major paintings and installations that define Vu Dan Tan’s artistic legacy as a trailblazer of contemporary art in Vietnam.
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