Dates: 6 July - 18 Aug, 2024

Hours: Mon-Sun, 10AM – 6PM

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

Register here: White Night - Đêm Trắng

Vietnam Art Collection (VAC) is delighted to present Trinh Cam Nhi's Open Studio, White Night, the result of her two-month residency at VAC Hanoi. This marks the artist's second solo display in Vietnam.

As the inaugural artist of the VAC residency in Hanoi, Trinh Cam Nhi is considered one of the most emerging artists from Vietnam. Cam Nhi was born and raised in an artistic family where her grandfather and her father both practiced painting in the lineage of Vietnamese modern art. Nhi went on to pursue art professionally when she received scholarships to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma between 2016 and 2020. Upon returning to Hanoi in 2020, she held her first solo exhibition, Garden of Unknowing, at Casa Italia, organized by the Italian embassy.

Throughout her painting practice, Trinh Cam Nhi is known for painting human bodies and flowers that oscillate between one another. In her paintings, the metamorphosed shapes take on a life of their own as conscious organisms. Compared to the older generation, like her father and his peers who witnessed Vietnam's transition from the modern to the contemporary between the 1970s and 1980s, Cam Nhi seeks to break the linear, singular perspective. She revisits the themes of female bodies and flowers favored by the most renowned artists in the history of Vietnamese modern arts, most of whom are male, and voices her solidarity through portraying femininity and intimacy by displacing the "gaze."

Since 2021, Trinh Cam Nhi has been exploring a new approach to her art, using an overarching grid as the starting point for her paintings. In Fragment of Soul (2023), a two-person exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City, the chessboard-inspired grid served as a visual device that allowed her to play around with optical illusions and experiment with forms and symbols. Underneath the grid, her expressive brushstrokes create organic forms that blend bodies and landscape, showcasing her evolving artistic vision that gravitates towards abstraction.

When Nhi joined the VAC residency in April 2024, she continued her daily practice of painting the chessboard structure; however, instead of applying oil on canvas, which was the primary medium for her previous practice, she wanted to experiment with acrylic, watercolor, and ink on Do paper - a Vietnamese traditional handcraft paper. Thanks to the paper's textural surface and the materialistic contrast between acrylic and ink, Nhi's paintings grew looser, subtler, and more poetic, and her application of brushstrokes gradually became more immediate, expressive, and direct. By mid-May, after repeatedly painting "the grid" for almost three years, Nhi finally felt the urge to let go of "the grid" and opened up her picture plane with immensity and intimacy at the same time. If Nhi previously focused on displacing the gaze through the implementation of the grid, she has now moved on to constructing a visuality of her own mind.

In White Night, Trinh Cam Nhi employs recurring motifs, such as curtains, eggs, and spirals, to construct images rooted in her thoughts, childhood memories, and consciousness. In science, the study of consciousness remains a contested territory. How memory weaves together lived experiences, told stories, and imagination continues to fascinate scientists, psychologists, and

artists. For this new body of works, Trinh Cam Nhi delves deeper into the notion of femininity to a more dialectic extent. The orderly grid is replaced with rhythmic patterns composed of eggs, circles, or floral shapes, giving rise to a sense of movement and formation. The exterior and the interior are indicated by the curtain, a sea of black ink contrasted by the solid white, accidental drips juxtaposed with deliberate circles. For the artist, the white night is "the quietest time when we return to ourselves, when our thoughts flow freely, free from all constraints of everyday life." Through the language of painting, the artist's soulful exploration into abstraction and intimacy

portrays the very act of perception, of consciousness.

During the residency, alongside her independent practice, Trinh Cam Nhi further explores the form of intimacy and the language of painting through an experimental, collaborative project with her long-time friend and artist, Hà Ninh Pham. They initiate a daily drawing conversation between 1 June and 30 June: every day, Nhi makes a drawing and sends a digital copy to Hà Ninh, who responds with his drawing without exchanging words. Along this non-verbal online communication process, both artists keep personal diaries documenting their thoughts and emotions, which are revealed to each other on 30 June. In conjunction with White Night, this collaborative work, titled

Hanoi, 06.2024, consisting of drawings and diaries by both artists, is on view in the alternative space at VAC Hanoi.

About the Resident Artist:

Born into an artistic family in Hanoi, Trinh Cam Nhi (b.1996) started pursuing her passion for arts at an early age. While primarily working on canvas, she recently began experimenting with other forms of expression, such as mixed media on canvas and work on paper. Her works explore the complexities of human emotions and inner reflections, pondering the existence of one or multiple unknown perspectives.

Trinh Cam Nhi received her BFA in Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in Rome, Italy. Nhi's debut solo show, Vườn Địa Đàng: Garden of Unknowing (2020), marked a striking arrival on the Vietnamese contemporary art scene. In 2023, she had a two-person exhibition with sculptor Lap Phuong, Fragment of Soul, in Ho Chi Minh City. Some notable group exhibitions include Far Away at the Horizon (2024, Hanoi), Swallow and Spit (2023, Malaysia), Winter Solstice (2022, Ho Chi Minh City), and Virtual Private Realms (2021, Hanoi), among others. In 2024, she joined the VAC Residency in Hanoi. Trinh Cam Nhi currently lives and works in Hanoi.

About the Guest Artist:

Hà Ninh Pham (b. 1991) is an artist from Hanoi, Vietnam. His work explores how we build up our understanding of territories from afar through reported materials. Spanning paintings, sculptures, drawing scrolls, and video games, his long-term project, My Land (2017- ), imagines an unknown world represented through maps, artifacts, steles, and stories.

Hà Ninh Pham earned his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2018 and his BFA from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2014. His work has been featured on Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, and ArtandMarket. He has joined several artists' residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Corporation of Yaddo in the United States, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, PLOP London in the United Kingdom, and the ASEAN Artists Residency Programme in Jakarta, Indonesia. Solo shows include Cheats Codes (2019), curated by Passenger Pigeon Press at FRONT Art Space, New York; Institute of Distance (2021), curated by Michael Lee at SEA Focus 2021, Singapore; and Recursive Fables (2022), curated by Van Do at A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in Design Studies at RMIT University Vietnam.

About VAC Residency Hanoi:

Fully funded by the Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), VAC Residency Hanoi is part of the LAUNCH program, which is specifically designed to support artists and cultural practitioners in Vietnam. Starting in April 2024, VAC's residency program aims to encourage artists and creatives in/from Vietnam to experiment with mediums, materials, and ideas new to their existing practices and explore across disciplines. Throughout the three-month residency, artists become the hosts and are encouraged to invite guest artists for collaboration. The program offers curatorial and network support, assists project development, and facilitates exchanges beyond borders. Based on the idea of a collaborative studio, our space in Hanoi serves as a hub for artistic production, communal activities, and public programs.

For more information, please get in touch with us at team@vac.art

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