After Walking, A Map

Opening: 06:30 PM – 08:30 PM, Sat 30 May 2026
Exhibition: 10 AM – 05 PM, Mon – Sat, 01 June – 10 July 2026
Vin Gallery
35/8 Nguyễn Văn Đậu Street, Binh Loi Trung, HCMC

From the organizer:

A map organizes space through boundaries, scale, and orientation, bringing unfamiliar places into an order that can be identified, navigated, and reached. The artist’s practice takes shape at the point where this order begins to shift: the map no longer confirms geographic fact, but becomes a structure through which the experience of travel is rearranged.

The works originate in the artist’s walks through different cities and towns. Upon arriving in an unfamiliar place, orientation is first established through the map; yet what remains are often the contours of architecture, the scale of streets, the passage between interior and exterior light, and the ways natural landscapes appear, recede, and disappear through movement. Space does not enter memory as a complete form, but emerges through partial impressions, bodily orientation, and details already beginning to fade.

Upon returning to the studio, drawing becomes a method of reorientation. Observation offers traces; memory alters proportion; forgetting creates intervals; imagination enters these intervals, allowing the image to move beyond the demands of geographical representation. The maps that emerge do not point to a fixed location, but reveal how space is dismantled, translated, and formed again after experience.

Architecture, interior space, and natural landscape no longer appear as separate subjects, but together form a terrain in motion. They point to a subtler dimension of travel: how one relies on landmarks to establish direction in an unfamiliar environment, and how, after departure, a place is reorganized through incomplete memory.

Here, deviation, omission, and imagination are not failures of representation, but the conditions through which the image comes into being. When a place is no longer defined by the accuracy of the map, but by the perceptions that remain after walking, landscape becomes an experience continually seen, remembered, and redrawn.

About artist

Thu Kim Vu graduated with her BFA from Hanoi University of Fine Arts, Vietnam and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, United States. Focusing on line drawing, paper material and using temporary spaces, she had been working on different projects through traveling to create a new experience based on how her line drawing changed the atmosphere of each space. Vu has participated in numbers of residencies worldwide which contribute a great influence in shaping her works in many directions.

In 2008, Vu participated in a residency Program at Vermont Studio Center and New York Mills Regional cultural center, Minnesota. Her work was expanded to doodle drawing and combined with different paper construction settings dealing with emotional, mental as well as physical aspects of using lines, brushstroke as a method of meditation. In 2009, Vu came to Goyang National Art studio, Korea and discovered a new dimension in her work experimenting with Korean traditional Hanji paper and expanding her brushstroke into an enormous scale larger than herself, creating spontaneous movement. In late 2010, Vu started a new exhibition at Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen in Germany, opening new ideas on how she de-forms the construction of spaces. From 2011, Vu participated residencies: Mc Coll Center of Visual Art (USA) (2011), Rockefeller Bellagio Center (Italy) (2011) and Museum of Contemporary art in La Coruna (Spain) (2013), Sylt Foundation residency in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016) where she has been continuing her idea of an imaginative city through drawing.

In the past years, Vu has been interested in Japanese culture and her studies of Washi paper leads her to new experimentation with paper sculpture and lighting based on her current experience in four residencies in Japan: Kamiyama Artists in Residence Program, Mino Paper Art Village, Sapporo Artist in Residence Program and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Vu is based in Hanoi, Vietnam as a freelance artist.