Exhibition “Wandering Fantasias”
14 Dec 2025 – 01 Feb 2026
Wiking Salon
79 Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, Nhà Bè, HCMC
From the organizer:
Wiking Salon is delighted to present the group presentation Wandering Fantasias featuring works by Tôn Thất Minh Nhật, Nguyễn Duy Mạnh, Lê Thuý, Nguyễn Việt Anh and Hoàng Thiện Phúc.
Wandering Fantasias considers the connections between nature, architecture, identity, and memory as dynamic sites shaped by cultural, environmental, and psychological forces. Rather than treating them as autonomous or self-generating, the exhibition highlights the structural logics, both visible and concealed, that inform how spaces are organised and how individuals locate themselves within them. The works marked by introspection, the exhibition reflects the pursuit of coherence in moments of instability. Through their multidisciplinary practices, the artists reveal the invisible structures of society: the hierarchies we inhabit, the histories we inherit, the truths we’ve been told.
Ton That Minh Nhat’s lacquer paintings employ sơn ta, a traditional Vietnamese lacquer derived from natural resin, as both a material and a conceptual tool. His meticulous layering process, built through gradual polishing, engraving, and burnishing, mirrors cycles of erosion and regeneration found in nature. Drawing upon imperial decorative motifs from Huế alongside woven patterns from everyday utilitarian baskets, Nhat fuses heritage and meditative repositories where temporal rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, are embedded into material form.
Lê Thúy’s poetic silk painting series The Barren Land maps the human relationship with soil, memory, and land ownership in post-war Vietnam. Using cracked earth, dried vegetation as recurring motifs, her work exposes the fraught history of cultivation, displacement, and environmental neglect. The land was parched, scarred, and fragmented—embody both the trauma of abandonment and the silent persistence of regeneration. Her analytic lens transforms landscape into a palimpsest of lived histories, suggesting that the land is both witness and participant in cycles of human desire and loss.
In the Bare Wound – Motherland series, Duy Mạnh pursues ceramic as a medium of incision. His process involves cutting, engraving, and firing porcelain surfaces to produce tactile scars across their glazes. These interventions, resembling ritualized mutilations, operate simultaneously as ornament and testimony. By confronting the violence inscribed within heritage materials, Mạnh reconfigures ceramics from vessels of tradition into spatial metaphors for the body and the nation—both containers of memory and sites of historical rupture.
Alternatively, Nguyễn Việt Anh investigates the mechanics of spatial construction where the uses of form, geometry, and void govern our psychological and physical experience of the environment. By abstracting architectural fragments into modular compositions, Việt Anh constructs hybrid spaces that oscillate between rational order and intuitive mapping. He draws attention to how modern architectural norms shape contemporary patterns of living and mobility. Thus, it reveals how space functions as both a disciplinary structure and a site of imaginative liberation.
Returning to his coastal hometown of Lagi, Hoàng Thiên Phúc extends his ongoing series The Flow through a material dialogue between painting, ceramics, and textiles. His practice explores Liminality—the thresholds where the real mutates into the hyperreal. Phúc stages fluid transitions between media, allowing organic motifs to expand beyond pictorial limits into sculptural and tactile dimensions. The resulting forms respond to ecological transformation and rapid urbanization, articulating a landscape in flux. His interdisciplinary approach underscores how local ecologies and cultural identities are continuously reshaped under global abstraction, exposing the precarious balance between organic adaptation and human imposition.
Wandering Fantasias ultimately proposes the exhibition space as a site of rehearsal. It’s where fractured maps of possible worlds coincide, those once fantastical, uncertain, and yet deeply human. Together, these artists do not aim to define reality but rather to expand it, inviting viewers to linger in what could be, rather than what is.
About the Artists
Tôn Thất Minh Nhật (b. 1982) graduated in 2007 from the University of Fine Arts Hue. Over the past 15 years Minh Nhật has transformed the practice of lacquer into a personal ritual in which he expounds memories and engraves the country’s heritage, particularly through the ancient architectural features of Huế, where he lives. After 15 years of practising and researching lacquer’s potentiality as a medium, Minh Nhật remains captivated by the flexibility and suppleness that it offers. He continues his journey to explore further possibilities of this material.
Some recent exhibitions by Tôn Thất Minh Nhật include: Entrusting to Emptiness, Wiking Salon, HCMC, Vietnam (2024); Time, Illuminated, Galerie BAQ, Paris, France (2024); Hanoi Grapevine Selection, Hanoi & Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2023); Đông Chí, MoT+++, HCMC, Vietnam (2023); Dreaming of a Foreign Land, Mơ Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam (2022).
Nguyễn Duy Mạnh (b. 1984) graduated from the College of Education in 2007 with a major in Fine Arts Education. He is a member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association and currently lives and works in Hanoi. Since 2006, Duy Mạnh has successively worked with media and materials such as painting, fiber, objects, and ceramics. Throughout his practice, Duy Mạnh is concerned with highlighting the vulnerability and disintegration of values and culture. He represents the trauma that disrupts an individual’s spiritual life in the face of ongoing reality. He creates pottery using forms and patterns inspired by the historical periods of the cultural region in which he lives. He deconstructs them by cutting, sawing and fragmenting.
Some of his selected exhibitions include: Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust, MASSMoCA, Massachusetts, USA (2025); Untamed Souls, Galerie BAO, Paris, France (2024); Becoming Alice: Through The Metal Tunnel, The Outpost, Hanoi, Vietnam (2024); The Inner Space, Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, Hanoi, Vietnam (2016).
Lê Thúy (b.1988) graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2013. Thúy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines memory, cultural inheritance, and the fragile relationship between humans and the natural environment. Her works reflect on the disappearance of landscapes, values, and lived histories amid rapid economic and ecological change. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, she creates quiet, contemplative environments that register the muted struggles of those displaced or forgotten, tracing subtle forms of resilience that endure beneath loss. Working primarily with silk, lacquer, natural dyes, and found materials, Thúy draws from Vietnamese craft traditions while expanding their expressive potential in a contemporary context.
Recent highlights from Lê Thuý includes the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain (2025); The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT11) at QAGOMA, Australia (2024); Desolation at A2Z Art Gallery, Paris, France (2024; )and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2022).
Nguyễn Việt Anh (b. 1989) is a painter based in Hanoi. He graduated with a major in Painting from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2014. His interests revolve around familiar places or architectural elements examined through the lens of time and light reflection. According to Việt Anh, architectural structures or objects illuminated by the sun at 3:00pm are the most emotionally resonant moments.
Some of his selected exhibitions include: Of light and linger, Wiking Salon, HCMC, Vietnam (2025); Traces of Becoming, SYBSY Penthouse, HCMC, Vietnam (2025); Ephemeral Dimensions, Wiking Salon, HCMC, Vietnam (2024); Morphing Wonders, VCCA, Hanoi, Vietnam.
Hoàng Thiện Phúc (b. 1994), is a vibrant and free-spirited artist from La Gi— coastal village in Binh Thuan province. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts in 2020, then ventured into the bustling art scene of Ho Chi Minh City. After a transformative period, he returned to La Gi to embark on a new artistic journey rooted in his origins.
Phúc’s bold, inventive approach has earned him growing recognition across the region. His work has been featured in Tree of Virtue, Mơ Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam ( 2024); Diverse Visions, Richard Koh Gallery, Singapore (2023), Hangover, Richard Koh Gallery, Singapore (2022) and Phuc: Cut, Draw, Paste, Place, Mơ Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam (2021).
About Wiking Salon:
Wiking Salon, founded in 2023, emerges as a dynamic space for contemporary art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Dedicated to fostering cutting-edge artistic expression, the gallery serves as a meeting ground for established and emerging artists, curators, and creative minds from around the world. Through thought-provoking exhibitions and dialogues, the gallery fosters a vibrant exchange that reflects the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art.
