Reception: Friday, 24 October, 5-7pm

On view through 23 November; closure 9 November to 17 November, 2025

Hours: 10:00 - 18:00 daily; registration highly encouraged

Registration link: https://forms.gle/Kq2NR2Wcc6C3Xn6V7

Location: VAC Hanoi, 6/44/11 To Ngoc Van, Tay Ho, Hanoi

Vietnam Art Collection (VAC) is delighted to announce the Open Studio of our Fall 2025 artists-in-residence: Florian Sông Nguyễn and Mifa. Their newly developed projects invite the public into intimate, evocative worlds exploring histories - personal, mythical, and ecological. This open studio is not only a culmination of their time in residency at VAC Hanoi but also a rare glimpse into their creative processes and the journeys that shape their work.

Florian Sông Nguyễn – “Anh Mã and the Serpent’s Mark”

With “Anh Mã and the Serpent’s Mark,” Florian Sông Nguyễn transforms the studio into a symbolic landscape of horses - at once real, remembered, and imagined, rendered in drawing, Dzo and Xuan paper, and newly incorporated metal forms. Horses, long entwined with human history, become Florian's lens for exploring the shifting boundaries between humanity and animality, memory and myth, presence and disappearance.

During his time at VAC, Nguyễn has expanded traditional techniques, experimenting with the tactile possibilities of handmade Dzo and Xuan paper and the interplay of strength and vulnerability found in metal. Through these materials, he constructs a living archive, a field in motion where visitors may encounter the silent yet persistent marks animals leave upon our collective memory and imagination.

This project is part of a broader research initiative, "Anh Mã and the Serpent’s Mark", which revisits the overlooked life of Mohamed Ben Aomar Larach, a Moroccan trade unionist reportedly named Anh Mã, meaning “Big Brother Horse,” a link between memory and myth. The display unfolds in two rooms: a central tableau of the horse flanked by mirrored hands, with twin serpents rising above, and a second room focused on the serpent as a principle of metamorphosis and rebirth. Together, the spaces form a symbolic map where history and fable cross, inviting viewers to reconsider what has been forgotten and to glimpse a form of mythogenesis where truth, history, and imagination converge.

Mifa – “10,000 Years in a Moment”

In “10,000 Years in a Moment,” Mifa distills her lifelong exploration of mark and memory onto Vietnamese điệp (scallop) paper—a luminous, unruly material that has become both collaborator and muse. Each brushstroke is both fossil and flash, evoking the idea that, while life may take millennia to leave its imprint in stone, pain or experience can carve itself onto the human heart in an instant. Balancing fragility and endurance, her drawn images give visible form to the rituals of remembrance and transformation in contemporary Vietnamese life.

During her residency, Mifa has pushed beyond traditional boundaries, building on ancient techniques such as gilding and calligraphy while experimenting with a new material, ceramics, unveiled for the first time at the Open Studio. Her creative process, shaped by intuition and emotion, is intentionally open to accident and chance, a method she likens to “having an unpredictable conversation, happily accepting every accident and always ready to make the best out of it.”

Drawing inspiration from Vietnamese folk art, Persian poetry, and Asian calligraphy, she weaves personal history with universal myth, creating luminous fields where memory and emotion are both fossilized and transformed. Through this practice, Mifa invites viewers to reflect on time, presence, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit.

About the artist

Florian Sông Nguyễn (b.1988) is a Franco-Vietnamese artist living between Paris, Ho Chi Minh City, and Marrakech. His practice centers on drawing as a permeable medium — one that gathers memory, summons imagination, and traces the fragile bonds between humans and other forms of life. Through installations, artist books, performances, and collaborative projects, he develops visual narratives where the intimate meets the mythical, and where reality is quietly unsettled by fiction. His work has been shown internationally, including at the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), the Musée Jenisch in Vevey (2024), Drawing Now in Paris (2024, 2025), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ho Chi Minh City (2018). He has presented solo exhibitions at the Institut Français in Hanoi (2017) and Ho Chi Minh City (2016), as well as in France at A2Z Art Gallery (Paris, 2025) and the Metaxu (Toulon, 2020). In parallel, he has collaborated on duo exhibitions at Arnaud Lebecq Gallery (Paris, 2024, 2025). He has published two artist books: Tu sais les insectes aussi ont besoin d’amour (Inpages, 2022) and Les chiens errants (Four Eyes,2024). His current research focuses on mythogenesis — exploring how fiction and myth can reshape silent histories, connect distant geographies, and reimagine our relationships with the living world.

Mifa (b.1990, Da Nang, Vietnam) is a painter whose practice centers on acrylic on traditional Vietnamese Diep (scallop) paper. Since 2015, she has been experimenting with techniques drawn from ancient Eastern civilizations—such as gilding, calligraphy, and manual printing—while integrating her own methods inspired by Vietnamese lacquer. Her images dwell on the harmony and conflict of Eastern ecologies and identities in a globalized present, seeking to preserve and extend a folk spirit while acknowledging its transformation. Her works have been displayed in China at the Yunnan Museum of Literature and Arts, the Dehong Museum of Arts, the Dehong Cultural Center, the Xishuangbanna Ethnic Museum; and in Vietnam in Hanoi, Saigon, Da Lat, Da Nang.