Tracing the Unseen
02 PM – 04:30 PM, Sun 20 Sep 2026
187 Lương Nhữ Học, Chợ Lớn ward, HCMC
Registration link (Limited to 10 participants)
From the organizer:
What remains of a story when its origins can no longer be verified? Next Sunday, we invite you to “Tracing the Unseen: A Workshop on Intaglio Printing”, where artist Thanh Tùng (Ches) will guide us in approaching urban legend not as a puzzle to be solved, but as an unstable form of collective memory via the practice of intaglio printing.
The workshop will introduce participants to intaglio printing: handmade printmaking and carving practices such as mezzotint, etching, and drypoint using an intaglio press, where ink settles into grooves carved into surfaces ranging from metal to mica, only to emerge on paper through pressure. Participants will then explore sites associated with Saigon–Chợ Lớn urban legends, sketching architectural forms and textures onto a transparent plexiglass plate. As the plate’s surface is worked with drypoint, translating visual notes into physical grooves, the initial record becomes a material trace that can be revealed on the surface of the paper.
The “trace” is no longer merely evidence of an event, but also the result of a chain of transmissive gestures: observing, recording, engraving, pressing, reproducing. Like the very urban legends it pursues, the trace may be proof, may be misdirection, or may be a ghost of collective memory. “Tracing the Unseen” proposes that handmade printmaking can become a flexible practice, where traces continue to reside in whatever form they take.
Registration fee: 80.000 VND/participant
*All of the registration fee will be used for material preparation.
“Tracing the Unseen” is a satellite program of “fiction, fraction”, a group exhibition of Lê Đ. Chung, Lê Nguyễn Minh Như, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai, Huyền Dương, Thanh Tùng (Ches) and Sophia Mai Brown.
About artist
Thanh Tùng (Ches, b. 1998, Hai Phong, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His practice is rooted in observations of everyday street life in Vietnam, where urbanization continually reshapes landscapes, ecosystems, and indigenous belief systems. Drawing on fables, urban legends, and oral histories, he constructs speculative narratives to explore what remains in the wake of these changes, reconnecting people with forms of life and traces that are gradually disappearing.
Thanh Tùng’s works has been featured in groups exhibitions, including Birds [ ] Land [ ] at Bụi Tre Collective (2026, HCMC), Đồng hiện trùng miên at Da Nang Museum (2025, Da Nang), Insomniaction Group exhibition #1 (2023, HCMC). In 2023, he presented his first solo showcase Động – A collection by Ches (HCMC, Vietnam), and co-founded Bụi Tre Collective – an artist-run collective aimed at providing support for emerging experimental artists in Vietnam.
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