Points of Relation
10 AM – 06 PM, Tues – Sun, 07 – 31 May 2026
Rare Sea
3 Đặng Thị Nhu, Bến Thành ward, HCMC
(Parking: TNXP parking lot – 4 Trương Định, Bến Thành Ward (900 m; 2 minutes by walking).)
From the organizer:
Rare Sea is pleased to introduce “Points of Relation”, a pop-up reading room on photography book, opening from May 7 to May 31, 2026. A response to the exhibition “the forest lives on as unfinished film reels”, “Points of Relation” brings together a collection of photography books released in Vietnam over the past three years, curated by Lê Nguyên Phương and Mai Nguyên Anh. These publications explore stories of community, labor, and transformations in contemporary Vietnamese society through the lens of young photographers from across the country.
At times intimate whispers, letters, and diary entries addressed to loved ones, at other times empathy with communities facing difficulties caused by the astonishing pace of urban growth; the featured publications emphasize the multidimensional connections between various facets of the society. Not merely pages of paper, these publications are surfaces bridging relations surrounding us.
As we launch the reading room, we warmly invite you to a cozy reading group session, “Reading together”, on this Saturday afternoon, May 9, 2026. Hosted by Lê Nguyên Phương, the shared reading will walk through the featured publications and delve deeper into dialogues about photography, landscape, family and production.
About the curators
Lê Nguyên Phương is a dummybook-loving photographer. During his time working in Australia, Phương’s handmade publications helped him receive a publishing award from Tall Poppy Press (2023), the Best Photobook Design Prize (2023) from the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, and Second Prize at the Australian & New Zealand Photobook Awards (2024). His publications have been exhibited and featured at Objectifs Centre for Photography & Film (Singapore), PHOTO 2024 Biennale (Australia), Polycopies Photobook Fair (Paris), LA Art Book Fair (USA), Singapore Art Book Fair, Bristol Photobook Festival (UK), among others. Phương is currently a lecturer in Photography at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia).
Mai Nguyên Anh is a Vietnamese, part-time photo artist whose work combines observational and poetic documentary elements to explore personal and social paradoxes. His practices are driven by self-reflections on the world around him, fuelled by the myriad of emotions and musings encountered in everyday existence. He developed his visual language through ongoing experiments with the photographic medium’s foundation, questioning its ability to walk on the edge of reality and fiction.
Nguyen Anh started out and worked as a photojournalist from 2012 to 2015 for AFP and VnExpress. In 2015, he was awarded a scholarship to the International Center of Photography in New York, where he completed the One-Year Creative Practices. His work has appeared in exhibitions, as well as publications such as the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail, among others.
In 2018, Nguyen Anh received the Open Category award at the inaugural Objectifs Documentary Award. He co-founded Matca, a community photography project in Vietnam in 2016. Since 2021, Nguyen Anh has been working with the French Institute in Vietnam to organize PhotoHanoi, a biennial event dedicated to providing an official platform for showcasing the photographic works of both Vietnamese and international artists to local audiences.
Follow updates on event’s page.
